This isn't even remotely the same thing as a "normal" wallscroll. This is a signed, one-of-a-kind piece that just happens to be large and vertical and so formatted like a wallscroll. It's made of indoor/outdoor strength vinyl, and is about three to five feet longer than your average poster or wallscroll. More to the point, it's a unique piece by an independent artist, namely Poe.
Typically, anime wallscrolls are about the same size as posters, or a little larger. They're also made of thin, cheap material, they're unsigned, and they're mass-produced. The pricing structure for those is completely different... the company that made your wallscrolls can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce a ton of them, but then they can expect to sell all of them for that $30 (or whatever the wholesale cost is, anyways). There's not even any royalties involved, most likely.
Of course it's reasonable for you to be surprised and dismayed by the high price, if you expected a normal wallscroll to be what you'd get for it... but this isn't a typical wallscroll, and it isn't even remotely intended to be. How could you have ever believed it would be one, or even anything close? We're a company of two people, we don't have the resources to produce mass-market merchandise like that.
So, how do you think I <b>should</b> feel, faced with expectations that clearly are not founded in the same reality I have to work with? Nobody seems to understand how much this stuff really costs. The price listed would be <b>selling at a loss,</b> it simply isn't possible to get these things printed any cheaper on our usual deadline, and we don't have any other source of income right now because we can't get the damn store working. Moreover, the price listed is hundreds of dollars less than the standard of value set by the sale of the last, similar piece.
It's not like I'm setting out to gouge people, I'm just trying to earn enough to replace the banner with a new one for this year. So yes, it's frustrating to feel condemned because I priced something the only way I could afford to.
>.<'
_________________ I <3 Parker
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