Great thread. I'm glad you brought this up again, Pretty -- it's very timely as summer dawns. Everyone who has posted has given wonderful insights not just for why people price kitties the way they do, but how they tackle the problem of bringing one's cattery closer to self-sufficiency.
I have a set of notecards in inventory that I reread from time to time, from Juiceberry Farm, dated around October through December of 2011. A couple of them by Theodore Nacht, "Understanding Market Basics for Breedables," and "Using Market Basics for Breedables," talk about these issues -- the devaluation, as well as the redemption one experiences when breeding is not just a rat-race for money but is rather done for love, a kind of aesthetic journey ... pursuit of a dream, expressing thoughts and longings through our personal configurations of kitten-ears and whiskers. (Now I'm feeling self-conscious about writing this, knowing that y'all will notice my mixed metaphors and mangled syntax. Oh and rambling. I notice it too but ... I can't do any better. )
In the notecard, Theodore talks about the nature of pricing. "Things are worth what you pay for them. This means that if you are only willing to pay 500L for something that you know regularly sells for 5000L, it is now worth 500L." Fire-sales of very recessive genes, he says, "lead[s] to recessive genes being made available to many people who would not otherwise have invested monetarily to the degree such a recessive trait deserves. This in return results in a recessive trait becoming common. Its degree of recessiveness does not change, but its rarity drops exponentially as it is bred out en masse." I know, I often buy kittens that are grievously underpriced, and the notecard chides me ... "remember when you are buying that you getting a steal devalues what you just purchased."
This doesn't mean that our priceless kitties themselves are devalued -- just the expectations of their prices on the market. Those expectations can be very local too. There are many markets-- the same cat (if there is any such thing as a 'same cat' apart from identical twins) might be expected to cost 400L in a store on one sim, 800L in a particular auction, 1000L in another auction, or 1200L in a Magic Box and listed on Marketplace. (Or of course, someone can sell it for 99 L if he or she is happy to subsidize the cost --buying and raising its parents and marketing it -- from RL funds or unrelated SL funds.)
Not all of us want to "play store" and become professional shopkeepers -- some of us totally suck at this aspect of the game. So we can't expect everyone to handle the task of selling kitties in the same way. (Some of us don't sell at all ... and just let boxes accumulate until we have 6,000 kittens.) It's as Deery and Jackson said so well -- we can't change the way others market their kitties, but that doesn't destroy the whole kitty economy.
I've also had the experience of inadvertently offering affordable kitties to new and enthusiastic breeders, who got hooked after buying a Gatcha kitty for 49 lindens (Gatcha box was labeled "menagerie kitties" too), came back and bought out the whole Gatcha box, and birthed and bred them all! It was so much fun to see those kittens live, teacups on shoulders! My economic reason for even trying the Gatcha box at that price ... was that i had gotten reduced to buying cat food with menagerie dollars, and it made more sense to sell the "menagerie kittens" to others who were trying to get a Tiger, and to buy my cat food with lindens instead. Some of those "menagerie kitties" did become Tiger food, but quite a lot of them turned into upstanding members of the gene pool -- probably reviving some old traits in the process ... like Forest eyes and such.
I have to comment about the idea that "anyone can buy two boxes, breed them together, and sell the result." Actually ... that, too, is an art that ought to be respected when it's done well, or even when it's done badly and expresses someone's ... individual kitty-making goals. For one thing, selecting the two boxes to bang together is an incredibly complex decision process (not even to mention the horrendous shopping process). But ... well, example from me: I buy 2 boxes, one with Odyssey Crystal Rose eyes, and one with Bengal Black fur and a fussy tail. Now I bang those 2 boxes together and pretty soon i have Bengal Blacks with Odyssey Crystal Rose, which is just something that I wanted to see! It wasn't mindless, even though I did get some of the ingredients ready-made from breeders who did most of the work before i came along and bought their boxes. Similar thing, when I saw an Ocicat Ebony Silver with eyes that i wanted to see on Snowshoe Cream, and lo and behold, the Ebony silver is hiding snowshoe cream. Am I taking advantage, if I jump to buy the Ebony Silver, the second I see him? It's pretty obvious that the person who bred that Ebony Silver was thinking, "let's get these eyes and traits on snowshoe cream," and the kitty I bought was sooo close to that goal. So ... I buy this boy, and smash it together with a snowshoe cream girl, and get exactly what I wanted!
As for the 99L kitty sales ... well, adding a kitty to my cattery is a big decision for me. I know how much it will cost to feed it for the 4 months of its breeding life, and how much time I'll spend studying its little pedigree. It had better be good. So if it's the right kitty, ... if I can afford the right kitty i'd rather buy it than some random kitty that someone decided to put "on sale."
Theodore's notecard says some really good things about making your own kitties hold their value in a competitive and treacherous market -- though he's writing at the end of 2011. "... If you undercut your competitors, you help no one. If your pet is identical to theirs in most ways, the price should be identical also. You must convince people to buy yours by promoting it (spamming ad groups, plurking, tweeting, posting its picture on flickr, etc.) and by breeding a superior lineage whose parents will give yours the edge. In the real world, virtually identical products with identical prices are differentiated by consumers through which has better advertising and better ingredients/construction. The virtual world operates in much the same way." I don't agree with him that the price of the identical "product" needs to be identical. How are we supposed to know all the comparable prices? Too much research is involved in finding out, too much trudging around multi-sim marketplaces : we have to use our best judgment to figure out what price to set. However ... if I am pretty sure "my product uses better ingredients" than some superficially identical boxes, then I'm not worried that shoppers would choose another cat because of its 99L price. It does not put pressure on me to set my price the same as the fire-sale box.
(Plus, apart from Menagerie Boxes -- and i ran out of them fast -- , I don't believe in setting kitten box below the cost of feeding the parents during its making -- i.e., no box should be sold below 150L ).
Thanks for your indulgence in letting me say all this
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