Interesting who reads my blog, with commentary occasionally taking the form of direct interaction with my 20 or so devoted readers. It so happened that 2 of them made themselves known to me in the last few hours, and, interestingly, both were in the antiques trade. Sales and pricing, it seems, were much on their minds.
The first fellow happened to be an antiques dealer from the East Coast who stops in from time to time, frequently making a purchase, with yesterday I am thankful to say, no exception. We are always pleased with sales to dealers, as this corroborates our belief that our pricing is at least sufficiently reasonable to allow our goods to be resold at a profit, and I remarked as such to the gentleman. With his long tenure in the trade, what he said in response was of keen, albeit infinitely practical, interest. ‘Pricing means nothing. Something is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it.’ Yes, of course, but following that line of reasoning, one would substitute price cards for a large sign suspended from the ceiling that says ‘Make offer.’ Occasionally people do, but with only a couple of exceptions, those offers were in our experience within reason and resulted in a sale.
This, then, brings me to a discussion of a few minutes ago with a neighboring dealer who also read yesterday’s blog entry. ‘Sure they pressure all of us on price,’ he said, ‘because they don’t know what they are looking at. If they did, they’d know all our prices are fair.’ The all-inclusive ‘they’ presumably the catch-all term for any antiques buyer, but more importantly, his assertion serves to further beg the question, what constitutes a fair price? Enough to keep the dealer in business is what one hopes, but certainly none of our clients has to date evinced a particularly marked desire to keep us afloat.
Nor should they. We hope to be thought amongst other things to be responsible business people. Not everyone in this business is, certainly where pricing is concerned. Frankly, our own inquiries to dealers about their stock that might be of interest to our clients is frequently a cause for astonishment, with pricing generally far in excess of what we would consider as reasonable. No one in any business should use the keystone method, assuming that a fair price is acquisition cost plus a (significant) markup. Those in the trade who presume that’s the way pricing should work are now known as ‘ex-dealers.’ What merchants in any industry know is that they must treat their inventory as a fungible commodity. To follow-on from yesterday’s blog, this is, of course, difficult to do in the art and antiques trade as so many subtle factors affect value. Consequently, it is a difficult matter to determine a fair market price.
Difficult but, witness trade novices like Keith and me, hardly impossible. Moreover, after a few years in the trade, shouldn’t one have an intuitive sense of fair pricing?