Also, there's been cases right here on BP.net of someone going into a petco/petsmart/whatever chain store and coming out with a morph(low grade, but a morph). It happens on occasion. And some of the normals they get in are spectacular normals, I've seen some really nice ones. Does that mean it's a rip off?
And to begin with, saying that it's worth it for a person to be able to walk out with their snake, vs having it shipped, doesn't at all mean the QUALITY is better than online. Plenty of people even on here have popped up saying "I just got XX at my local store..." meaning they almost definitely overpaid if you compare to expo prices. But they're all happy because they SAW the snake, SAW the price and were happy to pay it. These are folks that have been to expos and know about online sales and still were happy to buy their animal locally.
Marking a price up from kingsnake's average to sell it locally is often still a bargain because it's safer to buy a "in hand" snake, vs trusting a seller online to ship it to you... and you save the shipping cost which now can run you $70+.
Selling normals (esp males) locally or to petstores as wholesale is almost the only way to move them, because they're so low priced to begin with. But that doesn't mean that you should dump all the prices to $5 each and assume there's no market for them.
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