heh... it amused me yesterday to find Tom Thumb selling pitcher plants in their floral section. Don't they know they'll be going dormant soon?

They don't know, and the store managers wouldn't care if they did. This time of the year, most carnivore sales are impulse purchases: the plants are in their best form, they have beautiful coloration in order to attract the last prey of the season, and if they die, then it'll get chalked up to "they always die".

Well, that answered the question I was just coming here to ask after spending way too much time reading the website and not working.

...is there any particular reason that the temperate, need to be dormant carnivorous plants are the ones commonly sold as houseplants, and not the tropical, year-round ones you mention in your article about dormancy?

Well, you have a lot of reasons. Part of it is that most of your commercially raised carnivores (that is, the ones raised for the cubes) are generally produced by sterile tissue propagation. Most of the flytraps offered for sale in the US are raised this way, seeing as how growing them from seed is very undependable and many plants need two to four years of growing clusters strong enough to be separated out as individual plants. Even if they aren't raised through tissue propagation, Sarracenia pitcher plants are very easy to propagate from new growth along their rhizomes. Either way, they're very impressive plants, and they're also the most commonly known.

Another factor, and one I've discussed many a time with Jacob Farin and Jeff Dallas out at Sarracenia Northwest, is that the Nepenthes pitcher plants tend to get big if they're given the right conditions. Combine a slow-growing plant with impressive size once they get established, and you have plants that are rather hard to ship without damage. When they are shipped at a larger size, they tend to be the very easy varieties, such as N. alata and the hybrid "Miranda". "Miranda" has the advantages of easy care and absolutely gigantic traps compared to most other easy varieties, so it tends to show up in nurseries in big hanging pots. That, I'm afraid to say, is the only way you can convince most casual purchasers to spend $30 to $50 for a single carnivore. I can think of a lot of Nepenthes varieties that are just as interesting, but once you get above $25 for a plant, there'd better be a serious payoff if you're going to attract casual buyers.

As for the rest, a lot of it comes down to education. I hear it over and over that most people know of no carnivores other than flytraps. For me, half of the fun is pointing them to plants with more of an emotional payout. I mean, flytraps are interesting and all, but they're nowhere near as fascinating as a lot of other varieties.