You know, now that I am in the retail business, I realize what a scam it is when people say that price-fixing is illegal. It’s a totally bogus statement. Price-fixing is what makes the retail world go round, it seems. Pretty much every single distributor we have, they have a big angry terms of service agreement, wherein it explains that either we can’t sell their product for under the MSRP, or if we can, it sets strict limits of exactly what percent below MSRP we can sell. There’s even one really expensive helmet company that refuses to let anyone sell helmets over the internet, phone or mail order.

It’s total crap.

The whole reason companies do it, is so that they can more or less control the market value of their products. Like if you have somebody selling your $700 racing helmet for $400 or whatever, suddenly you get fucked. But not really (I don’t think), it’s only the people who actually choose to sell the helmet at $400 who are taking a hit. If we were to buy those helmets from our distributor, we still have to pay full cost, no matter what we sell it at retail. So fuck them, we should be able to lose money if we want.

Although… assuming we are a real company, we wouldn’t want to lose money and we’d want to keep our profit margins high. If we sold the items under market value, we stop doing that. We then force other companies to match our price, and they lose money too, until the problem squeezes back to the distributor who has to lower their costs in order to protect their profit margins. I think that’s right… I don’t know.

But anyway, the whole trick is, you have to agree to their terms in order to sell their items. This makes the whole price-fixing thing completely legal apparently, because it’s voluntarily agreed to. Fucking crazy.

No wonder why CD’s are only getting more and more expensive. It’s not because they are selling any less of them (I know they say they are, but people say a lot of things), it’s because people being able to get music for free devalues their products. But anyway, fuck the RIAA! And fuck price-fixing.