[fjtorres]

Sony prices have traditionally been high but they have always discounted pretty heavily.
In my time I've bought Sony CD changers, tape player, BD player, Vaio ultraportables at work, and they were always nicely discounted off their (very high) list prices.
In recent years, they (and Samsung, and LG) have tried to cap discounts on HDTVs and most retailers have gone along. The problem they've run into in 2012 and 13 is their pipeline gets clogged up in the summer and they are forced to relent by the fall because there is a worldwide glut of large screen LCD manufacturing capacity and no shortage of comparable product that is available at better prices.

Which is the same thing that happened with books: faced with "take it or leave it" pricing, enough readers walked away from the $12.99 BPH titles to make indie publishing socially acceptable.

Price fixing works if you have a cartel that controls enough of the market to make "take it or leave it" stick and that is no longer true for the BPH cartel. If it did, the Randy Penguin merger would've been blocked.