Taste and Distaste
When I visited a shop in Wisconsin, it had several gorgeous wooden and ceramic toys on clearance for 50 percent off. The owner told me that unique materials are a hard sell, and she explained that customers were leery of items that they hadn’t seen before and maybe didn’t understand - even with education. They really didn’t want to spend a lot of money on something they viewed as "risky." As a result, a toy that was considered a high-end, locked-in-a-case staple in Boston could be found in the clearance bin in Madison.
Which leads us to ...
The Price People Will Pay
In some cities, $20 buys you a round of drinks while in others it barely covers two beers. There’s a similar phenomenon with sex toys, except that in this case, shop owners need to cover their own costs and may also be limited by minimum price points set by product manufacturers. This results in some brands pricing themselves out of certain markets. I started the tour in Boston, where one shop I visited had an entire wall devoted to fancy, high-end vibrators, many of which were produced by a brand that I realized I hadn’t seen since I'd left the East Coast. They just didn’t exist in the Midwest. As a gentleman I met in Chicago said, "It’s like a sense of reserve. Even when we’re being kinky." (Get some tips on how to choose a high-quality vibe in Should I Buy That Sex Toy? Consult This Handy Flow Chart.)
Distribution Issues
Another thing that determines what's sold at the sex shops in your area has to do with what's available to those shops. Most sex shops are not ordering their products from every company they stock, but are instead going through distributors. This can be problematic because, as Metis Black, president of Tantus, told me, "distributors really have one person who is the buyer, and this person may or may not play with toys." This leaves the potential for a company’s full catalog of offerings to be hidden from a shop owner. Black tells a great story of Tantus’ experience:
