Thursday, May 28, 2009

Still chewing on that bone

I searched all Ravelry forums with the tag word ‘keystone.’ Found a bunch of boards, and started grouping them. Two patterns emerged: chatter about it stopped after September 2008, and a lot of people were confused.

Two camps were small but notable: the outraged and the ones who just shrugged it off as ‘normal business.’ Everybody else’s posts sounded a lot like I’m feeling today, concerned and desperate for some clarity on which companies are really doing what. There was a lot of back and forth with the clichéd he-said-she-said claims of, “Such ‘n such company keystone prices!”

To which a representative would inevitably respond with, “We do not!” And I didn’t see anybody backing it up, though a handful pointed to the blog Consumer Friendly Yarns.

The majority of the examining dialogues were on the Yarn forum. Those threads include

Two other Ravelry message boards also examined keystone pricing, and those threads were

I saved my favorite finding for last, and I bet ya can’t guess which message board it was on! On it, I believe I’ve found the reason for the chatter fading away, and I can only shake my head at such a crappy ending to this un-American tale. Maybe it’s not the only factor that made us yarn consumers hush and just take it, but here it is; do with it what ye will.

On Ravelry’s LimenViolet message board I found post #3 on the thread entitled ethical yarn businesses. In it, a link was shared to a news story about the Supreme Court nerfing the anti-trust laws, effectively giving manufacturers a lot of ability to fix prices on the retail end. On our end.

‘Scuse me, but I gotta go eat a milky way candy bar or something . . .

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