What I am explicitly saying is that the LGS has permanently lost my business.
Maybe. Maybe. But if you stick to that you'll be one customer in 10,000+ who would actually never buy from him again because he priced an item
you didn't buy from him higher than what you thought he should. I walk past items every single day that I won't buy because the money in my pocket is worth more to me than the item being offered for that cash. But unless the shop is continually pricing everything higher than I could get it for elsewhere for the same amount of effort -- I will not forgo shopping there. That would be silly. Good on 'em for making as much profit as they can. Maybe they'll be in business next year when someone else isn't. Maybe they'll expand their store and inventory with the extra cash. Maybe they'll record higher profits and be a stronger firm. That's awesome!
Maybe, when I can't find something ANYWHERE else, they'll have it. I might have to save another week or two to afford it at their price point, but if I NEED it (or WANT it) I can decide to spend the "get it now" cash. Thanks to them, I'll be able to decide that for myself.
Setting the price for a budget AR at $3000 has had the deleterious effect of losing a $500/yr customer for life. That would appear to be bad business sense.
Eh...that's a pretty tough concept to sell, as there's very little guarantee that 1 in 10,000 customers will actually refuse to come back ever. And if you do? Well, so what? Others absolutely will and their money will keep him afloat. You and the other handful who refuse aren't keeping him alive. 50 regulars and 50,000 occasional and walk-in customers are keeping him alive. You don't sign a contract to promise to always be a customer and what makes people stop coming, or want to come back, is a complicated set of issues.
Particularly since no one is going to buy an M&P15 Sport for $3000.
Oooooh YEAH? See here's the thing...they ARE. If he wasn't selling any at $3,000 the price wouldn't BE $3,000. That's the price at which he is SELLING guns. Not a "don't touch" price that will make them sit on the shelf collecting dust. The fact that YOU, personally, won't buy it for that price
machs nict to him.
The LGS had racks of rifles and cases of handguns, and reloading components and holsters and targets and all sorts of plentifully stocked other products, and had plenty of customers for those products. He was in no danger of going out of business if he sold an AR for a reasonable markup.
AND, since he's obviously selling AR-15 at that price ... he's in no danger of going out of business if he sells them for that (what you think is an) unreasonable markup, either!
He's not in any danger of going out of business because I refuse to shop there, either. But he's lost $500/yr, which will go to his competitors, and he's lost any referral business he used to get from me.
Ehhh, maybe. But if he's got product in stock and others don't? You and your pals will shop there. If he's got good deals on primers or holsters or boot socks? You and your pals will shop there. Shoot, I'll give you much more credit than I believe and accept that YOU never will again. Your pals still will -- and many thousands of others still will. And they'll be back again in a year when he's got stacks of ARs still in their boxes (or used buy-backs) for $600 because the panic is over.
That's the market forces working. We've seen it before, and very recently, too.
Are you going to boycott him when he's selling that Sport for $599 because he's pricing it BELOW the market? Surely that's just as unethical?
I'm not a free market capitalist. I'm not, in fact, any sort of capitalist.
Yeah, clearly -- and so very little of this will make sense to you. Other economic models, though, require governmental controls to force those structures upon buyers and seller. Absent those controls, people revert to a simple and basic "free market" model because that's what makes the most intrinsic sense. So until we manage to establish the sort of socialist price controls that will command prices to stay "in line" regardless of supply or demand, you've got to live in the world that IS.
But I have money to spend on things, and how I spend that money is determined by factors unaccounted for by academic market theories, no matter how doggedly clung to they are.
It doesn't really sound like it. It more sounds like you're a citizen of a free market who's decided that the items being sold are not worth the value of your money in pocket, at current prices. And that's your right. Buy, don't buy -- your choice!