Wow Pop Ups are expensive!

Mike Up wrote:
Can't believe that these makers are pricing these pop ups out of existence.

Popups are labour intensive to build and since manufacturers aren't in business simply to gratify consumers the final price at which you and I can buy these products will naturally reflect this. The market has changed in recent years - no longer are many of us as willing to tolerate the inconveniences of setting up a trailer with tenting, manufacturers have recognized this shift by introducing considerably more smaller, light weight variations of the conventional travel trailer that many find are a much more attractive alternative, for so many reasons. :B

When our boys were young we could camp anywhere with our popup, for as long as we wanted, and each summer for years we did. Eventually we moved on briefly to a hybrid then to a triple bunk bed K-Z Spree. We continued to camp quite a bit until they hit high school and no longer had the time or in fact the interest. :( Eventually it was only my wife & I camping so we sold the Spree and thinking it would be several years before we'd buy another travel trailer I bought a 10 yr old Coleman Yuma popup for myself, thinking I could at least get out there a couple times each season. I didn't really expect my wife would even bother with it but surprisingly she did and we quickly realized the same things that used to annoy us about a popup years earlier still annoyed us so I sold the popup within a few short months and accelerated our plans by buying our current 19' couple's travel trailer. We had proven to ourselves that going back to a popup was just not a viable solution at all. :R

My own dealer had been a Coleman / Fleetwood dealer since the beginning of time so when the company went out of business in 2011 he decided to sell Somerset Camping Trailer lookalikes. For a host of reasons, small production numbers being one, those campers were priced so high it took forever to sell them so eventually he dropped them entirely, selling just basic Viking popups. However his labour costs in selling a popup with so little profit eventually convinced him to stop selling them entirely in favour of travel trailers which are now his sole product and at this point in time are literally "flying off the shelves" in record numbers. For this dealer, with the economy as it is, there is virtually no reason at all to ever sell popups again. ;)