Salsa makes some good bikes (I used to own one) and as a company they are GREAT marketers around the image of Salsa bikes. Good enough to command an significant extra premium for what ever they sell, because so many people buy into the marketing image they tout. If you can live without the image, there are much better values to be had from other manufacturers on comparable bikes.

When a company sells out of their bikes in the first months of the new year, the laws of supply and demand means they can charge a premium for the bikes they do produce. Any good marketer turns that scarcity into an above average margin by pricing at a premium.