This sort of thing is hardly new. When the SX-70 was introduced, Polaroid
promised specialty shops that the camera would be kept out of the discount
stores for at least six months (probably more like a year), but it wasn't more
than two or three months before the discounters got it.
This provoked a revolt; many dealers wanted to stop carrying Polaroid products
altogether. Polaroid knew it needed its products in photo stores to maintain
credibility, so it introduced "Special Edition" products. These had slightly
different cosmetics and cost a few dollars more, but carried a five-year
warranty. The feeling was that if you couldn't get the customer to pay a few
bucks more for an extended warranty, you weren't a very good salesman.
There is also the matter of wholesale pricing. Perhaps the biggest offender was
Ponder & Best (who imported Olympus, the lenses and flashes sold under the
Vivitar marque, and other products). Ponder & Best seems to have had almost
bottomless discounts -- the more you bought, the bigger the discount, and you
could mix-and-match across product lines with few restrictions. The result was
that large New York and Los Angeles stores, as well as chains, who bought
hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of items on a single order, could sell lenses
for (literally) just a few dollars more than the wholesale prices the small
stores paid. This lead to a restraint-of-trade lawsuit, which Ponder & Best
lost. However, it appears that they continued such practices "under the table".
This is the real issue with the micro-Four-Thirds products being discussed.
It's not so much who's carrying the product, but whether the small dealer gets
a wholesale price that lets him compete with the big guys. In the US, this
problem seems to have been resolved by a "gentleman's agreement" to fix prices.
If you want a Canon 5D2 body, you pay $2700 just about anywhere, whether it's
B&H in New York or Uncle Harry's Photo Shoppe in Podunk. As "brick & mortar"
shops need roughly a 20% gross profit to stay in business, one can assume the
wholesale is around $2150, for everybody.
If Bert Keppler were still with us, I'd ask him what's really going on. Does
anybody know?
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