It was the secret no one told you, the thing you had to learn for yourself: viz. that in the antiques trade there was really no such thing as a "correct" price. Objective value-list value-was meaningless. If a customer came in clueless with money in hand {as most of them did} it didn't matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie's had recently gone for. An object-any object-was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it. In consequence, I'd started going through the store, removing some tags {so the customer would have to come to me for the price} and changing others-not all, but some. The trick, as I discovered through trial and error, was to keep at least a quarter of the prices low and jack up the rest, sometimes by as much as four and five hundred percent. Years of abnormally low prices had built up a base of devoted customers; leaving a quarter of the prices low kept them devoted, and ensured that people hunting for a bargain could still find one, if they looked. Leaving a quarter of the prices low also meant that, by some perverse alchemy, the marked-up prices seemed legitimate in comparison: for whatever reason, some people were more apt to put out fifteen hundred bucks for a Meissen teapot if it was placed next to a plainer but comparable piece selling {correctly, but cheaply} for a few hundred.
( Donna Tartt )
[ The Goldfinch ]
www.QuoteSweet.com