Battle Over Minimum Pricing Heating Up

The Wall Street Journal is covering developments in the gathering battle between manufacturers and retailers / discounters, especially online ones, over minimum prices. Earlier this year the Supreme Court upheld the right of manufacturers to enforce price floors for their products. Since then, manufacturers have increasingly been employing service companies like NetEnforcers to snitch on discounters who offer goods below "minimum advertised prices" (or MAPs), and to send DMCA takedown notices to the likes of eBay and Craigslist for below-minimum offers. Separately, the Journal reports that a coalition of discounters and retailers is using eBay as a stalking-horse in a campaign to get consumers, and then politicians, fired up enough to pass legislation outlawing MAPs.

Comments

Re:Price limits

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Like torture, the so called civilized american values are only in effect until our oversize cards and houses are in jeopardy. Once that happens, all rules are out the windows. Rule of law. Gone. Habeas corpus. Gone.

This ruling is more evidence we are in a depression. While do not want price fixing, we also do not want deflation. Such deflation has already hit the wages of the average amercian, which is fine, as lower wages boost the stock market. What does not boost the stock market is falling profits on rising revenue, which is what the ruling was intended to prevent.

Many retailers will sell a product for whatever it takes to the product to move in this recession/depression economy. While our values indicate that we should allow the market to work in this way, the risk to a few is too great to allow such market adjustments, although we know from history tha such meddling is not all it is cracked up to be.