Fender just jacked up all it's prices...

[Johnny Alien]

Ah, the Minimum Resale Price Restriction loophole, also known as vertical price fixing. Y'know, I'm sure a lot of companies were quite happy when this practice was declared legal by the Supreme Court. However, these agreements only tell retailers what the minimum price they can resell merchandise at. It's not the same as a retailer being told exactly how much they have to sell a product for.

What would be truly illegal would be if competing manufacturers got together to artificially set prices at certain levels, free-market be damned. That would be horizontal price fixing and it's still pounced on by the Justice Department. (e.g.: airlines colluding to set jet fuel surcharge prices)

That being said, I will admit that the tone of my first post was pretty strong and black-and-white. I should have qualified it better. Sorry 'bout that. But shades-of-grey aside, I still stand by the basic gist of what I said.

Yes MAP and lots of companies do it and usually the only ones that don't sell for lower are the big guys like GC. However in the case of Mesa they completely enforce it. They can't legally drop the seller for selling lower but what they do is not honor the warranty for the customer. So if you buy a Mesa at lower than MAP you bought it without a warranty.

 

[mcm]

Then don't buy it. I just raised my prices too. Capitalism baby

 

[ChadPaulJones]

Why all of the hand-wringing about MSRP? The street prices haven't changed since last year.

 

[throbgod13]

if you're really upset at the new Fender pricing, look at how Warwick has raised prices over the last 5 years and get back to me about Fender..

if i had the cash, i'd like one of those Jazz 5 standards.. i played one a couple of years ago, and was very impressed with it..

 

[guy n. cognito]

Yes MAP and lots of companies do it and usually the only ones that don't sell for lower are the big guys like GC. However in the case of Mesa they completely enforce it. They can't legally drop the seller for selling lower but what they do is not honor the warranty for the customer. So if you buy a Mesa at lower than MAP you bought it without a warranty.

Huh?

 

[Baird6869]

So if you buy a Mesa at lower than MAP you bought it without a warranty.

Not true.

I got a great deal ($150-200 off MAP) on a Mesa M9 thru a friend that works at Canada's largest retailer. When it went back to Mesa (twice) for service, there were no issues.

 

[Nagchampa]

MAP is "minimum advertised price". Meaning a retailer cannot legally advertise a product for less than that. Once face to face a retailer can sell you the product for whatever they want.
In my retail sales experience I have had to report other retailers for violating this.
Sorry. Just couldn't let that misinformation go.

 

[pbass888]

if you bought a mia fender jazz today at gc for $1350 today its about 217 in 1960 dollars. In 1960 the jazz cost from fenders summer price list was 280 bucks (according to mr google)..... so in todays dollars thats about $1750.. ...

Im not a fan of fender price increases!!!!... but I see they are basically cheaper than they were in 1960.

 

[georgestrings]

Yes MAP and lots of companies do it and usually the only ones that don't sell for lower are the big guys like GC. However in the case of Mesa they completely enforce it. They can't legally drop the seller for selling lower but what they do is not honor the warranty for the customer. So if you buy a Mesa at lower than MAP you bought it without a warranty.

You don't know what you're talking about - Mesa has a fully transferrable warranty, which means they even warranty gear bought used - let alone the scenario you're describing...

AFAIK, Mesa enforces their pricing setup by cutting off dealers that don't adhere to their agreements - nothing like what you *claim*...



- georgestrings