Price and Availability: Another Thought On Clones

Protip: if it comes with a mini screw-
driver like the one above... it's a clone.

Spend any amount of time in a vaping shop or lounge and the topic of ‘clones’ is bound to come up. Likewise, any forum or blog will deliver countless opinions on the issue. Unfortunately much of the expressed opinion, especially online, is in support of counterfeits. Go figure, right?

 If we filter out all the dipshits that think they are entitled to the latest and greatest, super fancy, high performance gear at cig-a-like prices (Dude, if you really don’t want’ to spend more than twenty dollars on a mod or atty, go buy one at Wallmart! What’s that? You say they don’t carry mods and atomizers? Well then, I guess you don’t really need one.). If we filter those people out we find that one of the remaining arguments is the belief that the price and scarcity of authentic gear is due only to the greed of the manufacturers.


Because... you know... manufacturers would totally give up market share in favor of pissing off consumers by jacking up prices and creating artificial scarcity by limiting their production. Yeah... businesses total succeed that way.

 It’s certainly true that high price and scarcity are reasonable complaints when most of the legitimate products available are on the more expensive side and are very limited in their availability. As I see it, those are the two big ‘problems’ with authentics, but we should recognize that part of that problem is that vaping has grown faster than anyone expected. Give the industry a chance to mature and it will start to catch up with the demand. Until then, scarcity and price are not artificial or unreasonable. Someone had to invest their life savings or take out a huge loan to start a business…. They had to lease space, buy manufacturing equipment, hire workers, purchase materials. They can’t afford to make hundreds of thousands of units, the materials cost alone is a limiting factor. So they make what they can afford to and hope that their mod or atomizer sells, and sells well enough to not only pay the bills, but for them to someday scale up so that future production runs can be larger. If we support them they can afford to scale up, their per unit costs go down, and we can expect less expensive authentics in the future. If we refuse to support them by buying counterfeits, then they will never be able to expand beyond the small businesses making limited, and expensive gear.