Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
As for the substance, what would be the most likely explanation for why Kindle Paperwhite prices at the US office supply chains are virtually identical with those on Amazon.com, without the occasional deep discount seen on most other products? And when Staples or OfficeMax do discount Kindles, the discount is more often that you get a gift card than an actual deep price reduction. On its face, it looks awfully like the minimum advertised AKA agency pricing preferred by those dreaded big publishers, as well as Apple. But, hey, this is the great Amazon, who puts the customer above all others, so my suspicions must be a mere fantasy.
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It could be a minimum advertised price situation hard to say for sure, but it's also likely the case that the margins are very slim on the devices (Amazon's admitted to selling them at or near cost so can't be offering them to retailers too cheap) and so there's little room for them to be discounted. It's not like the store can discount it and hope to make up for the loss by selling you books for it. At most you may buy a cover or charger which has a much higher markup than the device itself. You often get a gift card because it has the potential to get you in their store one more time and a $20 (or whatever) gift card isn't really costing the store $20 out of pocket. It's not agency in the sense that there are no discounts from the set price ever. Staples has had $50 off tablets many times and it, at least some of the time, it applies to Kindle Fire's.