I've only been doing this for a bout a year, but I have probably seen about an avg 10-15% price increase across the board. I'm not really even taking doggie's nut into consideration here, that might really skew things even further.
I don't really pay attention to exchange rates, but perhaps the us dollar is down as well? Hell, I'm paying 10% more everywhere. Fast food, groceries, utilities, everything seems to be going up.
A lot of people also are going to assume that expensive=quality. They see a $9 GH WW next to a $4 seedsman WW, and the average person will assume that the $9 WW is superior. Is it? Maybe? But seedsman WW gets consistently great reviews. However, the average person will never do any research beyond the seedbank web site.
If you were a full time breeder, would you want to sell your work for $2-3 a seed when all of your peers are charging double or triple that?
Or even worse, some pollen chucker with a few quality strains is having a mass orgy with mary, and selling the resulting og purple widow berry kush skunk haze for $10-20 a seed?
And people buy it all. Have you ever heard of a seed company going out of business from lack of demand?
I'm just stoned and rambling. Smoking some pretty good homegrown bagseed from a friend, ironic as that may be.
Have any of you grown out the BC gear before? They have some really interesting looking strains.