Smogon Forums

They pay less than they sell it for, usually by a lot. That's how businesses work.

Right, and I get that for like grocery stores and stuff, but for these kinds of stores I just don't see them selling that much anyway. How insanely big are those margins?

Why don't you buy the materials to make the instruments yourself? Or call up an author to get the rights to print a book? There's a lot of effort saved. This is why Amazon is a big deal because they can stock more than these small shops, with greater variety, so they can have smaller margins but greater revenue and thus lower prices

Yeah I'm just wondering how big those margins are? Like how many times greater?


And do these stores technically go in debt for a while buying so much stuff?

Yes, but sometimes they'll get capital investors to back them in that stage

IDK, I just walk into a Barnes and Noble and I see they have all this stuff and I just think if they're only selling say, a 10th of the store (which itself I think is somewhat generous) how much money are they really making?

can you enlighten me on this

they are making a lot of money. People mark things up an exorbitant amount