Quote:
Originally Posted by user_none
Yes. Agency pricing is where the publisher not the store sets the price. The store selling has little to no say in the price.
This is the same as General Mills saying to Kroger that Cheerios can only be sold for $12 a box no exceptions. In this model Kroger cannot change the price they sell cheerios for sales or add any additional markup to the product. I use cereal as an example to show how asinine ageny pricing is. The store buys the product and shouldnt be dictated what they can sell it for. Free market economics should be used to establish and determine the best pricing for a particular store.
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The problem is not agency pricing (which is neither asinine or anti-free market). The problem is the agency *price.*.
Itunes uses agency pricing and most people don't complain about the price. Ebay uses agency pricing, and likewise.
If the publishers had moved to agency pricing and sold new bestsellers for $5.99, everyone would be talking about how Amazon was ripping us off with its $9.99 prices, how it was right for the publisher to set the price, how we don't need middlemen, etc. The only problem with agency pricing is that, in this case, the publishers set the price at a price people believe to be too high.
But that has everything to do with the price, and little to do with the agency.