While I agree that a lot of "premium" e-juice places are making a killing on e-juice that doesn't cost very much to produce, I think they will have to adapt with the marketplace.
I still vape out of my KFL, and go through about 3-4 ml of juice a day. I think the standard today is to drop the nic level to 3 or 6mg, and go with more cloud based subohm tanks. My Kanger Subtank killed juice (and battery) quickly while I was briefly trying it out, but I didn't like the flavor and the 12mg nicotine would give me a headache with that much vapor.
The $22 30ml bottle of premium juice may have had a larger market when the industry standard was clearos like Vivi Novas, Protanks, etc., but I think they will need to adjust their pricing over time as the industry changes. If people are going through 10ml+ of juice per day, they will look for alternatives to save them money.
I, like many, will never DIY, so I will continue to look for good, budget priced e-juice vendors and go with the best value for me. My ADV from ITC only costs $19.99 for 120ml, and $35.99 for 240ml and lasts me a good 4-5 months.
I'm looking to switch it up this month, so I just ordered three 120ml bottles of Casey Jones Mainline Reserve for $75 shipped. A little pricier, but nowhere near what some of these places charge.
Again, I think some of these places will adapt their pricing, or they won't be able to stay in business. It's like food places that sell soda for $2 a cup when it costs 5 cents to make the soda, and another few pennies for the cup. Still plenty of profit to be made there, even if they sold it for $1 instead of $2. Ever notice that employees are usually required to ask "anything to drink?"
All these vendors material costs are probably about the same, so you know any place could do 120ml for $19.99 and make a profit if they wanted to. The main difference is that these premium vendors usually have nice glass bottles and have holding costs for having them pre-steep for a month. Still not worth the price difference IMO.
If some of these places (Five Pawns for one) want to keep their prices high, I think they may be able to survive as a niche, special occasion flavor, but the days of 30ml for $30 as an ADV are going to be gone.
Edit: I didn't finish reading your post, so I didn't realize that you were speaking more about B&M prices. Well that's not really fair. A lot of vape shops are just resellers. They don't buy in mass quantity, so they're probably paying about as much as we can online for equipment. Most people don't buy equipment from shops though.
Most of the sales comes from repeat sales, which will probably be of their e-juice. The shop obviously isn't paying the $1 the vendor spent to make it. Just a wild guess, but I'm betting that the markup is probably somewhere between 100-200%.
Around here, a small vape shop's rent alone is probably $2-3k before you pay for the electricity, employees, then take a salary. So yeah, I don't fault the shops themselves for charging so much for juice/equipment, but I think some online premium juice places could take down the prices a little bit.
I realize there may be thousands in startup costs, but when you're making 1500-2000% percent per bottle of juice, you can make that back up pretty quickly.
