Hi 3P! Nice to see you. Your shop guy, ask next time, does he get Star/ESP/(Gold line?) for $7.50, or Champ/Z/Opto for $7.25? What about your pricing back in the day, (before oil pushed everything up $1+ across the board) was it below that? Those are the base prices direct for Streamline Neutron and Proton. I don't know anything about the shop or their market, who they buy from, their retail prices, etc etc, but from what I recall the base-level Streamline price with no volume discount whatsoever is lower than any standard pricing I've seen from other single shot makers for those plastic grades.
The shops that do have them, hope they sell well for the shop owners and make players happy.
I have a weird point of view on this. Back in the 90's I was getting base plastic for $4.85 and Millennium/Pro/Glow/Elite Pro for $6.85. They retailed for $7.00 and $10.00, so I was making $2.15/$3.15 a disc. I sold over 10,000 golf discs in 1998 and the gross profit was $26,000. The reason I didn't quit my park job and open a disc golf shop was the knowledge that at that thin a profit margin, I'd have to sell more like 50,000 discs/year to make a living selling golf discs.
MY understanding is that right after I got out, the premium plastics carried a better profit margin and made selling discs more viable. That would have been a good thing. While I like cheap stuff, you have to pay enough to sustain the places you buy from.
When I was setting up a DD account for the park this fall, I noticed the MSRP's were high. As a player I was thinking "I don't want to pay $18.99 for that" but for the park I was thinking "If we can get $18.99 for these that would be great for business." You could make disc golf more of a profit-generator. Then MVP comes along and seems to be heading in the other direction. As a player it gets the product closer the the price my cheap wallet wants to pay. However, it depends on the profit margin. If that price pushes the profit margin back to the $2/$3 a disc range for the retailer, that's not really a good thing in my view.
So now back to what I don't know. I don't know what that profit margin is. I have ZAM saying the wholesale price is low and I have no reason to believe he is lying. I have another person selling discs for a living who I also have no reason to believe is lying to me saying the wholesale price is not low and the difference is coming out of his pocket.
Most people have never tried to sell golf discs and they really wouldn't care. They see lower price and that's good.
Either way it would need to be sustainable. If the material costs are the same, somebody is making less money off these discs. Whoever is making less money has to be OK with that. I just happened to talk to someone who said the somebody making less money was him, and he wasn't OK with it. I'm not looking at an invoice, so I can't tell anything for sure.