Artemis

A lot of the ‘cheap’ flea products have active ingredients which have been around for 10+ years and so are no longer subject to copyright. Problem is once those meds have been in the market for 10+ years, they may not be all that effective.

Often they’re cheap and nasty medication to start with, and pharmaceutical companies often copyright the transport medium too, the other compounds in there that distribute the insecticide across/around the skin. You can have different products with the same active, but one will cause chemical burns and one will not.

Case in point, I saw a bunch of dogs for chemical burns over their shoulders one year because some enterprising idiot decided to buy imidacloprid used to spray on crops and put it on dogs, because it was significantly cheaper. There’s a reason.

Something at the supermarket does not have to have proven itself to the same degree that a product for same at a vet clinic needs to. If you buy a product at the supermarket that doesn’t work, are you going to complain to the supermarket? If you buy a product at a vet clinic that doesn’t work, you most certainly will be complaining to the vet!

Pharmaceutical companies don’t set their prices just based on what it costs to produce a product. They price it based on what they think the consumers will pay. That’s why products that do the same thing are all around the same price point. 

It’s an unfortunate result of for-profit businesses doing all the research, but the main driving force setting a price for a product is what they think people will pay. I am not permitted to give details, but there are market research surveys offered to vets on a semi-regular basis which ask questions like “What do you think a reasonable price is for a product which does X, Y and Z?”

Case in point, cerenia tablets are the only non-sedating tablet for car sickness in dogs. When they were first released, they were eight times more expensive than they are now. Nobody bought them, so the price mysteriously dropped.

Reconcile was a brand of beef-flavoured prozac for dogs, at more than double the price of human brand prozac from the chemist. Nobody bought it, they stopped making it.

As a vet I don’t determine these prices by the way. We can determine the in-clinic markup, but not the wholesale price. And products like flea treatments which are non-prescription and widely advertised often have a recommended retail price we’re encouraged to follow.