Cheap Kills Good

I posted worms for sale on the local neighborhood website. I am giving a good deal on worms and supplies delivered with personal service. I sell worms by the pound which is what it really takes to get a bin going in a reasonable amount of time. If you want to compost your kitchen scraps or produce garden fertilizer, you need a pound to get that good start. A pound of worms is about 1000 red wigglers.

Someone else on the site is advertising worms for composting at $5. The customer drives to pick up on the side of the road near some apartment complex. For $5 the customer gets only 25 worms! Sadly, 25 worms is almost a guarantee to think you have failed. Those sad few worms will hide in the corners and won’t find each other for mating and multiplying. The customer will think they did something wrong.

It turns out, their ad is clobbering mine. Apparently, my $48 pound of worms scares people.

If you do the math. Customers are instead buying 25 worms at $8000/pound!

At the local bait shop, you can buy 25 worms for just under $3. It is likely this person is just buying a stack of bait containers and reselling them on the street corner to the unaware.

Luckily, my little worm farm will sell out again this spring. As the worm bins regenerate, I will sell a few more pounds through the rest of the year as I continue to build production capacity. At some point I will raise my prices to stop bleeding cash. So, I am not personally hurt by these shenanigans, but our hobby and industry get a bad name. It makes me mad.