Admission prices will keep going up as long as the market follows

Timber-Rider, you are endlessly entertaining....

I'm fascinated by your sense of entitlement.

Parks that charge more than you care to pay aren't exercising a keen sense of what their market will bear, they're deliberately seeking to anger customers.

Touring acts that increase their prices aren't being savvy businesspeople, they're deliberately seeking to anger customers.

Las Vegas is filled with savvy businesspeople. They aren't offering $69 rooms at "lavish" hotels because they didn't understand what they were doing when they built them. They are offering $69 rooms in "lavish" hotels because, in Vegas, the money is made in the casinos, not the rooms. Casinos are built on the idea of having a lot of people lose a lot of money. Anything a resort operator can do to encourage people to hang around and lose more money only adds to the bottom line.

I will take on your TV example.

10000 tvs at $200 each makes 2M.

7500 tvs at $300 each makes 2.25M + 1500 tvsa marked down to $150 each is an extra .225M.

While not a direct comparison to park tickets it gets the point most here have been trying to make.

I'm going to explain this as simply as possible.

Timber-Rider said:

If you were selling TV's and had, 10,000 to sell, and you knew there was a demand for them, and could sell them all, would you raise the price on those TV's with that logic? With the chance that raising that price might cause fewer people than you thought to buy those TV's and you end up with a few thousand TV's that you can't sell because you priced them too high? Or, would you put a good price on those TV's and sell them all.

If I had 10,000 TV's to sell, why would I sell them for $100 if I could sell all 10,000 of them at $400 each?

(arbitrary numbers used - put any number you'd like in the $100 spot and any higher number in the $400 spot)

Because everyone would still buy them at $400, but they'd be REALLY mad.

I would plot anticipated demand at each price point, then figure out how to maximize my profits. Then again, I interned in business with the Underpants Gnomes.

I'm in disbelief that this thread keeps going. I looked at the title and thought, why not name the article "Grass is Still Green and the Sky is Still Blue?" I guess not very many people think that way.

~Rob

Clearly you'll want to take a page from T-R's copy of the Cedar Fair playbook and buy all your rival tv stores, then pay the rents, salaries, utilities etc to keep them all open for a couple of years so that you can then shut them all down and get all their tvs for free.

Ha!

My first thought when reading the title to this thread was ..."well, DUH!".

When talking about supply & demand, propane comes to mind, as this winter has been so harsh. The previous winters, I was paying less than $2/gal. Even back in November it was low when I had them fill tank up hoping it would get me through. Unfortunately, I had to get more last week and the price had jumped up to $3.15/gal. And with a minimum 200 gal delivery, I had to shell out more than I wanted. But, I NEEDED it, and PAID for it.

As far as the televisions are concerned, I would take 5% of the televisions and mark them at one price and put them right next to the other 95% at a much higher price to make it seem like the lower price is a good value no matter what I set the price at.

I would make all my regular customers wait in an empty room for no reason while attempting to purchase a TV. Then, I would sell pagers that allowed you to not wait AND look down your nose at people who were buying TV's without a pager. The pager would be a hollow plastic box. I would call it "TVQing."

And I would give them MagicTVBands where they can enter their tv choices in advance and breeze through the process.

I would give my televisions a popcorn scent.

Selling all 10,000 of your TVs vs. selling half of them doesn't diminish the experience your TV-buying customers have. Filling your park up with 50,000 people vs. 30,000 people does.

Difference.