Canadian Airgun Forum

I do a search here in the forums and find the references to Lebaron's and SirMailOrder and so on. I check their prices and look at the website for Shooting Chrony (who make the ones these retailers sell- i.e. the F1 and such) and discover, surprise-surprise, all the Canadian retailers are charging more than list price for the product (i.e. like 20-40 per cent more). $140 CDN vs. people on Ebay selling them for $75 US is just an insult- so I go and investigate a bit more.

Next, I carefully look over Shooting Chrony's website www.shootingchrony.com and what do I discover? Holy crap- they are a Canadian company- not U.S. based at all.

Turns out you can buy directly from them out of their office in Mississauga and pay list price- not the inflated BS from the retailers. (For example, $112.45 from them vs. $135.99 from SirMailOrder- that's almost $24).

So, if you're looking for a Chrony- try them directly

SHOOTING CHRONY INC.
2446 Cawthra Rd., Bldg. 1, Unit 10
Mississauga, Ontario L5A 3K6 CANADA

Tel.:905-276-6292 Fax: 905-276-6295
To ORDER call toll free: 1-800-385-3161

UnReal Eh ,
I knew about this B.S. for awhile now. I can't believe how they get away with doing this kinda Business. Give my head a shake when I see crap like this... Good info to know


Mike...

The price you get them from manufacturers only counts in profit for the manufacturer only, airgun dealers need to make a profit also. Really they might sell 2 or 3 chronies a month, who buy's them other than a select few any ways?

I have been thinking about making a chrony using 2 optical gates and a digital stop watch. Pellet enters first gate, triggers watch, pellet enters second, stops the watch and then I use the time and distance between the gates to calculate speed.

Don't let "business jive-o-speak" get you screwed around. "List" price is what the manufacturer puts on an item as an indicator of what a retailer should charge and allows for a given markup. This pre-determined markup is usually what any given industry considers "normal"- I don't know what is considered "normal" in the world of guns and airguns- but you can bet it's at least 25%- meaning that a SirMailOrder would be paying a maximum of $89.96 for the item. Usually, there are extra allowances made to retailers vs. list price as well- i.e. stepped volume discounts, monthly or annual rebates, etc. etc. If retailers order more than one at a time, the shipping cost, per item, goes down. Heck, a mail-order place like SirMail doesn't even have to concern themselves with this and get the item drop-shipped to the customer's door- meaning no shipping cost from manufacturer to the retailer that isn't recovered.

Anyways, my point is that everyone tries to make their price structure some sort of "business case argument" where it's all just jive and BS- they want more profit and the easy way to do it is to jack their price.

I agree that it's wrong for sir mail order to charge that price because they are large and established, but if they sold for cheap then you would be buying from them and not smaller competitors. If the prices are too high, then don't buy, simple as that.

There are people who will complain no matter what, price too high means that theyre greedy and price too low means that theyre like wal-mart.

I think part of the price problem in Canada is that Shooting Chrony had Canadian list prices that were based on a 50% US exchange rate (it was that bad for quite a while, and much worse too). They finally reduced their Canadian list prices earlier in '06 (it might have been April) to reflect a more current exchange rate, but many of the '06 catalog prices you are seeing were put up in '06 before this was done. I predict '07 cat prices will be more reasonable.

FWIW, I ordered my chrony from the US and even with shipping it was substantially cheaper than in Canada. Doesn't make sense when they're made 30 miles down the 401 from me... I wouldn't bother doing this for the cheapest model, the savings are only worthwhile (because of shipping cost which is essentially fixed) for more expensive models.

Another aspect of "high" prices in Canada: what's SC's competition? For price, there's nothing, they could set the prices even higher...those who know would buy elsewhere, those who don't pay more, like they do for everything else...

OTOH, a chrony is something you can keep "forever", so whatever you pay, it's not a big deal over time, I can almost guarantee you've spent plenty more $$ on something more useless.