Paying The Right Price

What's the right price for a camera? This is a question that exercises the wits of many of our clients - but I sometimes wonder if they tend to fool themselves with the answer.

We see all sorts of prices here. Some seem fair and some do not - I am particularly suspicious of low-ball offers coming from unidentifiable sources on the internet or passed by word-of-mouth. I think many of them are based on imagination - designed to hold the attention of the reader or listener until the unidentified source can invent the next one.

Sometimes these prices are ludicrously high - anyone who has ever looked into the little camera store in Nürnberg will know what I mean - and one can only wonder if the writer of these advertisements has missed a couple days of medication. That is a kind thought, as is the one that assigns this sort of behaviour to a sense of humour. I'm not too sure - I looked in the window of that little store and I saw the owner and I don't think you could have got a laugh out of him with a bayonet...

Now we get all sorts of games here; Whoomi, The Singapore Railway, J Card, and Eye No to mention a few. We cope with them as best as we can. They all are postulated upon reducing the price of the goods we sell but I am starting to think that this is harming the players. You see, when they play and win, their sense of victory is very short lived - and the value that the winners place upon the trophy ( the new camera ) is reduced in proportion to the price.

In short, if you pay peanut money, you regard whatever you have as peanuts. You don't respect the camera, value its features, expect it to last, or make it last. You are willing to trade it in on the Next Big Thing before the Big Thing you have in hand actually works for you. You buy short and sell yourself short.

Consider valuing what you have not on the discount you wheedled but on a proper price that accounts for the performance. Performance is better than ever too.

Final note - If you have read this far without screaming in rage and pelting the computer screen with rocks, I will admit that you can pay far too much for some goods. I have two Penny's khaki shirts and an old Eisenhower jacket that I wear around the house. They are wonderfully comfortable but as I inherited them from my late father 31 years ago they are costly. I would far rather he were here now to be wearing them around our house...

Dick Stein