Of course we never did. When cigarettes got to be $2.50 a pack we’d quit. We didn’t…
My question is has there ever been a product that was sucessful and then price itself out of the market.
I’m not talking about a particular brand (i.e. Like Salem or Winston cigarettes) I’m talking about a product (i.e. cigarettes in general)
Health insurance?
I quit buying “Playboy” when it went to a buck an issue. This was roughly the end of the Jurassic era.
JB
Lex Non Favet Delicatorum Votis
Personally, price is why I quit collecting comic books.
I started when they were $0.35 and stuck with it up to $0.75. Then DC started making specialy issues on Baxter (high-grade) paper at $1-$3. I collected a few titles of these. Then they slowly transferred all of their titles to this paper. Soon my $20/month “hobby” was a $50-70/month “investment”.
They also started cross-referencing titles so much that you’d miss half a good story line if you bought “The Flash” but not “Justice League Europe”.
That was one of my problems as well, AWB, with specifically the titles you mention. (Well, okay, not The Flash, but definitely with the JLI stuff.) I even tried collecting Legion of Super-Heroes, but that series’s price was one step below graphic novels.
And the bad thing about the “investment” aspect of it all is that the resell market sucks eggs right now. I’ve got stuff still sitting around, and I quit collecting about 8 or 9 years ago.
“Bodie, I noticed you stopped stuttering.”
“I’ve been giving myself shock treatments.”
“Up the voltage.”
-Real Genius
I feel a lot of sports products and services have priced themselves out of their original market and into new ones. Tickets to sporting events used to be a hell of a lot cheaper, and a Dad (or Mom) could take his/her kids to the game without taking out a second mortgage. Today, even cheap seats aren’t particularly cheap, so a new, more affluent audience has replaced the younger, blue-collar crowds of ages past.
I believe baseball cards are in danger of pricing themselves out of the “kids” market and becoming almost exclusively the domain of adult collectors.
And the $20 CD is not far away. It will be interesting to see what happens when that psychological barrier is breached.
The examples given so far don’t really answer the question, because even though these things became too expensive for our tastes, other people were willing to pay for the stuff, and so the item continues to be made and sold. The OP is looking for something where everyone stopped buying it, and so the manufacturer stopped making it, and no competitor filled in for them with a more affordable knockoff.
I don’t think you’ll ever find such an item, because our words are too flexible. Go over to the “Failed Inventions of the Twentieth Century”, and you’ll see a lot of stuff that failed for real practical reasons, but also a lot of stuff that turned into a fad that no one is interested in any more.
But other things failed to live up to their hyped expectations. I could argue that these things could have met those expectations, if the manufacturers had poured enough money into them to make them better. But that would have priced them out of the market, as asked by the OP. But is that really a case of being priced out of the market, or is it a case of becoming uninteresting?
I’m thinking especially about the Aquacar. It was quite mediocre as a car, and even more mediocre as a boat. It could have been better at both, but who would’ve bought it at that price?
By the way…
I am on a very tight budget, and when I go to the convenience store, one of the best values is Drake’s cookies. Four half-ounce cookies (2 oz. total) for a quarter. That’s a half-pound of decent cookies for a buck. Price is printed on the package, same price in any store that carries them.
About a year ago, they went to only three cookies a pack, for the same quarter. Suddenly, they weren’t such a bargain anymore. Not a rip-off price, but not as attractive as before either, and the other stuff in the store started looking better. My purchases of Drake’s cookies must have dropped by about 75%.
About 3-4 months later, I noticed the packages had changed: “FREE! 33% MORE” or something like that. Buy the regular three-cookie package, and get a fourth cookie free. Special limited-time deal it seemed. Fine, call it what you want, but four cookies for a quarter is a good deal, and I started buying them again.
About 3-4 months after that, another interesting thing happened: No more fancy come-on notice on the package, but still four cookies for a quarter. And so they are even today.
It’s quite obvious to me that I’m not the only one who balked at the price hike. Sales must have really dropped terribly, and the consumer has won.
Mind you, I’m not mad at Drake’s or anything. They have they right to charge whatever they want. And I realize that eventually their costs will rise to make the current price impossible. But for the time being, this is one of the finest examples of Supply And Demand that I’ve ever seen.
I think all fads eventually price themselves out of the market. Just last year, housewives were practically murdering one another to get a fucking $1000 beanie baby. This year it’s Pokemon. Yeah, a stupid bunch of cards that sell for hundreds of dollars…that makes a lot of sense to me. Hell, I’ve never understood baseball cards using that same logic. If they’re really worth so much, you’d think someone would start counterfeiting them.
The truth is, however, that mainstream products like CDs are actually kept in check by competing technologies. As it is, most people I know get songs via MP3 unless the WHOLE ALBUM is good. If cigarette companies kept raising their prices, it would only be a matter of time before someone would come out with a cheap generic (they probably already have and I don’t know about it).
I would argue this already happened in the high-end perfume market. Take a $200 bottle of ‘Joy’ and the Sav-on $30 knock-off and I dare anyone to tell me there’s a difference.
Here’s another example of creating “new” markets:
Sell regular gray sweatshirts for 10 bucks…plenty of buyers. Up the price to 40 bucks, market dries up. Slap a Calvin Klein or Tommy H. etc… logo on them, voila! new market.
“Bodie, I noticed you stopped stuttering.”
“I’ve been giving myself shock treatments.”
“Up the voltage.”
-Real Genius
read it again, Flypside. I think he meant counterfeiting baseball cards.
Small, private aircraft. At one point, the U.S. small aircraft industry was making tens of thousands of aircraft a year. But product liability, government regulation, and other factors causes the price to rise until almost no one bought small aircraft. Cessna stopped making piston airplanes, Grumman stopped making them, Piper went bankrupt, and only a few manufacturers like Mooney and Beechcraft kept making them, but only a handful a year.
A light airplane went from being the price of a luxury auto to close to half a million dollars for a Beech Bonanza.
Ookpik: Here’s another example of creating “new” markets:
Sell regular gray sweatshirts for 10 bucks…plenty of buyers. Up the price to 40 bucks, market dries up. Slap a Calvin Klein or Tommy H. etc… logo on them, voila! new market.
For a while, I thought Donna Karan (sp?) made sweatshirts and T-shirts. 
And before that, I thought her “logo” shirts said “DINKY”.
*Flypsyde: That was one of my problems as well, AWB, with specifically the titles you mention. (Well, okay, not The Flash, but definitely with the JLI stuff.) I even tried collecting Legion of Super-Heroes, but that series’s price was one step below graphic novels.
And the bad thing about the “investment” aspect of it all is that the resell market sucks eggs right now. I’ve got stuff still sitting around, and I quit collecting about 8 or 9 years ago. *
I’ve got boxes of comics too that I should get rid of. I took a look in a month ago, and there were comics that I hadn’t even read! DC was doing so many crossovers, and I didn’t want to miss the story. But by the time I quit, I wasn’t even reading them! sigh
I think I’ll go see if a local comic shop would buy them back for some nominal price. Somebody might be looking for them, and I will get back some attic space.
Cigarettes in Mass my not be priced outrageously but the government seems to think that no matter how many taxes you put on the cigarettes people will keep buying them at the same rate. So far they seem to be right but I think eventually the taxes will make cigarettes too expensive for people to buy and drive the companies out of business.
Comics priced me out of the market, too. I jumped in right before Superman died, at about $1.35 apiece, then watched them creep up to about $1.75 apiece before I quit. I’ve got boxes upon boxes of them. Anything made between his death, and him becoming a being of pure energy, I’ve got it, if he’s in it. All crossovers, special issues (with special covers. Didn’t buy newsstand), I’ve got it. Collection was worth 3k last time I priced it, probably more now. But, dealers I talk to are only willing to pay $25 per longbox. Yeah fucking right.
–Tim
We are the children of the Eighties. We are not the first “lost generation” nor today’s lost generation; in fact, we think we know just where we stand - or are discovering it as we speak.
As far as cigarettes go, I’m from Jersey and when I got down here to DC for school I was fairly shocked at the $4.50-a-pack price. Now, 80% of my campus smokes, but nobody buys cigarettes within city limits. People go on “smoke runs” and metro out to Virginia to either bring back a couple cartons for themselves or a whole buttload of smokes to sell. If cigs go up to $4.50 or $5 nationally it may actually reduce the youth market, if not the adult one.
At the video store recently, I remarked that the first big video sold (that I remember) was Top Gun, and it sold for $90. Now you can get videos for $15-$30.
I agree about the sports tickets. Although at Coors Field, you can pick up tix in the Rockpile for a buck. They’re awful seats, but that’s where the real fans sit.
John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt. That’s my name too.
Wait, no it isn’t.
Many videos still have a list price close to a hundred dollars because they are intended to be purchased by video stores. Time was, not every video was thought to be something someone would want to own.
Comic books I stopped buying every month when Neil Gaiman stopped doing Sandman.
Nekosoft