You have a very soothing voice, great for a PodCast. Keep up the great work! The music is fun too… had a good laugh on the way to work!

Has anyone ever told you that you use the phrase “at any rate” quite a bit? Thirteen times in this PodCast!! =)

Happy Knitting!

And as always great show Guido, Keep up the good work!

Jess
Beneath The Fiber Moon

I also subscribe to the Cat’s video podcast Lets Knit2gether. On her latest episode, 1/19/07, she mentioned you! Just wanted to let you know in case you hadn’t heard, or seen it yet.

I’ve never heard a song that has the character Sara portrayed in THAT way!
Michael Del Vecchio has the BEST laugh!
Those were great interviews!

And stop apologizing about anything! You are just FINE at podcasting when and however often you want to do it!

No. I’m not your mother….just old enough to be your mother!
Enjoy your week! And come back to us when you can…

I just listened to your most recent show and really enjoyed it! I was wondering if you were planning on doing a full review of “Knitting with Balls” in the near future. I like to knit for my fiance, but he’s very particular about what he’ll wear (very plain, almost no color, etc.), so I was wondering if the patterns in this book might be good for him and if it would be a good addition to my knitting library.

Looking forward to the next show!

To quote Carol (quoting the FTC above), “The antitrust laws, however, give a manufacturer latitude to adopt a policy regarding a desired level of resale prices….”, meaning that in SOME cases vertical price-fixing is allowed. Not all cases, and likely not MOST cases.

I have run both a brick & mortar yarn shop as well as a web-only yarn shop and I can say that the business expenses are extremely comparable. For our online yarn shop, we pay rent for office space, electricity, phone, internet, etc. We have 4 employees who must be knowledgeable not only about yarn, but about computers as well. We field all sorts of customer service questions via phone and email. Since we’re not visible “on the street” like a brick & mortar yarn shop, we pay thousands of dollars every month in search engine advertising to drive traffic to our site. We have office equipment, computers (5 of them!), computer programs, and programming services to pay for as well. You get the point. The costs are more comparable than you might realize.

Another thing to keep in mind is the “convenience” of getting to take the product home with you immediately (by shopping at your LYS) as opposed to having to wait for it to be delivered (when ordering online). Not to mention shipping charges. If you REALLY want to level the playing field here, then let’s also make all customers who shop at LYS’s pay shipping charges and wait a week for their yarn! It’s apples and oranges here — LYS’s and online yarn shops offer different things and BOTH should be “assessed” by the quality of what they offer, NOT by what a yarn manufacturer deems is necessary to stay in business.

I also would like to address the quote from Carol’s original post stating, “When a great many retailers can’t sell their Yummy Yarn inventory, or their costs are such that they just can’t charge only $6 and still make a profit, they won’t order it anymore. Yummy Yarns is going to lose business. Yummy Yarns might even go out of business. No more Yummy Yarns.” This statement is (in my opinion) incorrect. If retailer X sells Yummy Yarns for $6.00 per skein and retailer Z can’t compete, how does Yummy Yarns go out of business? They’re still selling Yummy Yarns (and plenty of it) via retailer X aren’t they? Not only that, but Yummy Yarns just may be selling MORE of their yarns via retailer X (because the customers can actually afford it at $6.00 per skein) than if retailer Z tries to sell it at $10.00 per skein. Chances are that skein will sit on the shelf a lot longer at $10.00 per skein than it would at $6.00 per skein, don’t you think?

Once a wholesaler sells a product to a retailer, it no longer belongs to the wholesaler and the retailer should be free to do with the product as they wish. They should be able to give the product away as a gift if they so choose. If a wholesaler requires a certain retail price for their product, then they should retail it themselves (as Knitpicks does) and not wholesale it. If we allow wholesalers the ability to dictate what retailers do with their products after they sell it to them, what’s next? Will wholesalers then start putting restrictions on WHO is worthy of knitting with their products? Sounds ridiculous but if they’re so concerned about protecting their image then it makes sense. Heaven forbid an inexperienced knitter should knit with Milli’s yarns and make Milli’s yarns look bad!

It doesn’t make sense for wholesalers to dictate retail price unless their product is shoddy to begin with. If a manufacturer produces quality products, people will pay for it. America was founded on a free market economy, and competition in the market-place is as American as apple pie. If you brick & mortar yarn shops can’t compete price-wise with the online yarn shops then you need to do a little introspection to see how you CAN compete. You have MANY advantages that online-only yarn shops do not have. Use them! But don’t cheat the system (and your customers) by calling the manufacturer’s and “tattling” on your competitor for being able to sell their products for less, and keeping yarn prices artificially inflated. As Sarah said, once businesses no longer need to compete with eachother, quality will go down while the retail prices remain high, and the ONLY ones who benefit from this type of business practice are the greedy retailers who believe that price-fixing and keystone pricing keeps them in business.

If you haven’t already done so, check out Consumer Friendly Yarns. Consumers, educate yourselves and then contact the yarn manufacturers and tell them how you feel about keystone pricing. Knit with “consumer friendly yarns” (yarn manufacturers who don’t require keystone pricing) whenever you get a chance — eventually the manufacturers will realize that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by abandoning their keystone pricing policies and playing “fair” once and for all.