I actually think that it's the uncertainty of what our leadership plans on doing to deal with the banks, Wall Street, taxes, etc. to stimulate the economy that's made this market drop so fast...
With the current situation, I have no faith that this administration has a clue about how to approach it, let alone how to deal with it. This uncertainty results in people living in the fear that the only thing they feel they can be certain about, is that "cash is king", and so they don't spend any of that hard earned cash on anything other than necessities. Custom cues and cases don't fall into that category. Gas and bologna become the main concern.
Companies also start worrying about their reserves and profit margins, and start "trimming fat", in other words having a smaller crew to do more work for the same or less pay. People lose their jobs and now that discretionary spending is gone, and cues and cases aren't the only things that suffer.
As for the Dale Perry analogy, I think there's a lot more to that whole story than simply a good marketing strategy. Dale does production cues with rounded inlays done on a machine. He can call them 1 of 1's all day long, but they are production cues. He also made this move when the economy was good, so he had no idea what was going to transpire down the road (hell, Warren Buffet wasn't smart enough to see the extent of this, let alone Dale Perry!). He just decided to make cheaper cues and sell them himself (virtually screwing his dealer network who had bought cues from him when they were fairly well made, only to end up competing directly with Dale's Ebay cues).
I do think that cue prices had reached a level that was probably somewhat inflated, as well, but this is generally based on supply and demand, and when people had jobs and good stock portfolios, they could and would pay what the market would bear. In the artificial economy we were experiencing, the wages were as artificial as the prices of things, so it didn't seem "wrong" for a young person making a six figure income right out of college to be buying a house worth a million dollars, but that has changed pretty radically since the big crash.
I think we might be a little smarter in the future, and maybe the prices will eventually get back to what we had a couple of years ago, or maybe they won't, but I hope when the dust settles, we don't think that production cues or cases are the only way to go just because they're cheap. I still think there is something to be said about the pride of ownership in something that's handcrafted, and frankly that equates to money. You just can't compare a production case that's made on an assembly line in an hour and a half with cheap, untrained labor, with a unique case that has hundreds of hours of hand fitting and tooling.
Anyways, enough of the old soapbox! Thanks for your input, Shawn. We might have a difference of opinion, but that's one of the beauties of living in this country... Now back to selling cases in a bad economy
!
Steve
