they're pricey in part because sales are so low. when i was the record buyer for a store in michigan back in the mid 90s, i quickly realized that we needed to sell 2 records to make up the loss for 1 unsold record. that is, we bought the import records wholesale for about $6.50, and sold them for $9.99. so the markup was $3.49.

a bad week would put us in the whole bigtime, and before i got there, the guy before me had had something like 10 bad weeks in a row...