Obviouly, being a brick-and-mortar shop in the US, they have to price their teas high enough to cover the overhead and make a profit. From an end consumer’s perspective, though, $95 for a cooked pu’er is many times the retail-end prices through online vendors in China or in the US. A 2005 “rare and one-time limited production” high quality cooked pu’er that has the most tendency to increase in value from year to year (justified or otherwise) can be had for much less than $95. Most of the 2005 regular cooked pu’er nowadays run between $10 – 35 per 357gr disc…and that is the retail-end price with middlemen costs factored in and with high-spending Westerners (myself included) as the target market.

A pu’er tea factory usually makes a wide gamut of teas, from high to low quality ones. If the cake above is from Menghai Dayi (I’m not sure unless you have a pic of the logo on the wrapper and/or the little embedded ticket in the middle of the disc), they usually command a higher price than most other factories…but they still don’t — or very rarely — go above the $35 mark for a 2-year old *cooked* cake nowadays.

Yes, 2 years is considered a baby age for pu’er, but it doesn’t matter as much for the cooked type than for the raw type. Cooked tea doesn’t evolve as much (if at all), unlike raw pu’er tea. A few years of proper storage is known to get rid of any nasty / mud-y / pond-y / barnyard-y in some cooked teas that have those undesireable “newly released” aromas. Not all have those aromas to begin with, however.

I only meant my comments in the best of intention.