The thing is, this is a problem that goes beyond the Internet.
Fair trading has been absent for a considerable time now. The remedy lies not primarily in law, but in common sense and the manufacturers seeing the wood for the trees.
My local camera dealer in Scotland used to carry Leica, Nkon and Hasselblad. Though I never bought Leica I bought and kept each of the other two systems during those years there.
One day, I walked over to his shop to buy something for my 'blad system and he turned me down. Asked what was up, he said he had been "let go" becaused he could not provide the sales numbers that the big guys in Leeds and London could. He went on to explain that 'blad was asking for more money per camera from him than the folks in London were selling the cameras for at the time. That any maker thinks it right to charge one price to a big retail company and yet a higher one to a small, beggars belief. It is mad on at least two counts: the unit is making the maker less money when sold to the big dealership; if you wanted a 'blad nothing was gonna make you buy a Bronica (probably playing the same game, anyway), so 'blad was going to make a sale to you regardless. Thus, Mr Maker was making less, overall, per unit than if he sold to all his retailers in the same country at the same price because in the end, the same number of units was going to ship.
Yes, that is commercial blindness and leads to fewer and fewer shops remaining in business and providing that first-hand experience that can make you pull out your cheque book or card right on the spot
I wrote at the start that the remedy perhaps lay not in law but in common sense. On reconsideration, perhaps it should lie in law and makers be prevented from supplying at different, discriminatory prices, to different clients. For a start, it would help keep the high streets from becoming graffiti studios, and keep more local business alive. If anyone thinks paying twenty bucks more on a few hundred bucks worth of equipment is too much, maybe they shouldn't be buying at all. And that's the kind of margin I was talking about. When I was buying 'blad it would have made no difference to me whatsoever.
Free markets sound great in theory but they do not always work that way. The giants always manage to destroy the small people, and even the small people that have success often find they have to sell themselves to giants to stay in business against bigger competitors. The fashion business is full of examples of that, where great ideas become swallowed up by huge corporations. More control, in fewer and fewer hands, is ultimately not good for anyone but the controllers.
Just this mornng I was listening on Sky News to a Glasgow taxi driver who had been with Uber for a year. He ended up, after that year, at around £ 4 per hour with a Mercedes to pay for... Uber is going public today for how many billions? This should prompt anyone with the capacity for thought to think! Is it the future we want? And make no mistake, it affects every single one of us,
