HRoth - 3:59 pm on Jul 13, 2010 (gmt 0)

Recently I had a would-be customer who called to ask if I had a very rare and expensive widget. It just so happened that I was creating the page to put up five of those particular widgets, which had taken me almost two years to bring to fruition. I told her that, and she asked me the price. I said the price would range from $75 to $185.00.

She was immediately enraged. "I can get an American version of that widget for $3.99! [The American version is a completely different thing.] That's terrible that you are charging so much! You must be some kind of crooked businessman! You don't want to share with the community! It's just greed!"

All this while I was trying to interrupt, pointing out that I had created these myself, this was a very rare widget, no one else even sold such a widget, it had taken me almost two years and a lot of knowledge and skill to come up with these widgets, no one else knew how to do it, etc., but it was pointless. The "share with the community" thing especially made me mad. Content thieves in my niche have told me that. I lost my temper and said, "Tell you what--go on down to WalMart and see what they charge for theirs." And I hung up on her. Of course, WalMart would never sell this widget. I was so mad I wrote about it on my blog: People asking for something rare and wondrous, begging, pleading, crying, pleas please pleas, and then when you finally can supply it, act like it is some cheap plastic crap churned out in the millions by a Chinese sweatshop. Rant snarl howl snap.

I sold two of those widgets in five hours of putting up that page. The rest sold in 10 days. I decided then to double the price on the next batch of these widgets. So there, lady. Guess what you can do with your $3.99.