Price Limbo

by William Bass, Publishing Assistant

Grossly cheap products are like sugar—extremely satisfying at first, but at the end of the day, terribly unhealthy for you. The institution of slashing prices can have potentially dire consequences for the thing we actually value, the product itself. This Wal-Mart economic model of “how low can you go” has currently hit the publishing world in an all out “penny war” as described by New York Times columnist Motoko Rich in her article "In Book-Pricing Battle, How Low Can They Go?" According to Rich, “Target…has entered the battle to bring down the price of some of the holiday season’s biggest anticipated hardcover books to the lowest possible level. And Wal-Mart, which started it all and has vowed to maintain the lowest prices, immediately fired back.” While the new Steven King novel is listed at $35, this holiday season one doesn’t have to put it on layaway as the retailer giants have started the bidding under $10. As if participating in a passive aggressive poker match, Target, Wal-Mart, and Amazon have all moved the ante down a dollar or even a penny on this season’s top sellers in order to capture the elusive attention of customers. Michael Norris, an analyst for Simba Information, stated that this price warfare could be “particularly damaging to booksellers because they could not afford to discount that heavily.” The monolithic retailers, on the other hand, can keep on rolling back prices since they “don’t need to sell books in order to stay in business.”

Obviously, consumers aren't always privy to what goes into the creation of a book: graphic design, typesetting, and editing, just to name a few stages in the process. David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, bluntly states that “A hell of a lot goes into the creation of a book or a career of a writer, and to have our top products savagely discounted is not good for the long-term health of our business.” As noted above, Wal-Mart and Target’s price war will wreak havoc on your favorite bookseller and eventually the quality of the books themselves. Consequently, this “savage discount” appeals to the immediate gratification of our wallets, bypassing our values. If we value books and other products that have been produced with quality and care, then we must choose to not participate in this war on prices. In the end, we must make a decision about what is healthy for us in the long-run: a quality book at a fair price that benefits booksellers, publishers, and authors, or the sugary gratification of the new Sarah Palin book for a paltry nine dollars.