In my honest opinion,
This is the way I see it. If your a dealer, and you only sell Army daggers. You have 2 choices. You can have a website with pictures of your expensive daggers you sell, or you can have a website with inexpensive daggers with nothing on it.
It's not like every other day someone walks into your place of business with 5 or 6 Army daggers for sale. So the supply to a degree is limited. So as a businessman you slowly increase your prices until you reach a happy medium of inventory and no empty shelves.
If these dealers sold these Army daggers for $400.00 and $500.00 the shelves would be empty and there would be a waiting list a mile long.
I believe it was Pat that said, we as collectors are the ones that did the damage to this hobby by paying the inflated prices. We're all guilty of it. I looked for a police officer sword for over a year and finally bought one from Tom Johnson for I think $1395.00, I thought it was a good price. I think it's still listed as sold on his site.
I do think some of the dealers got out of hand with their inflated prices however it is what the market will bear, because trust me if we all got together and stopped buying from the dealers the prices will come down or they would go out of business.
The only problem with that scenario is the big dealers already made their money and this would only hurt the smaller dealers. It's kind of like this recession we're all in together, it's not hurting the 1% of the U.S. population that controls like 41% of the money/wealth.
Before I end this I would like to say that I agree 100% hands down with Pat also when he said "I wouldn't be worried about those "super fakes" and I'm convinced that none of these daggers would pass a "hand on" inspection, I mean none". I truly believe that.
Just my two cents.
Thanks
Rich
Last edited by Pitbull63; 01/23/2012 11:11 PM.
