Contact For Price

I don’t have a problem with this. When I’m actually in the market to BUY, I’ll contact the seller. When I’m just perusing for entertainment I’ll move on. About 6 months ago I had a thread asking advice regarding speaker/ component isolation. The rep for one of the products being discussed actually contacted me via PM based on what I posted. He asked me to “ make an offer “ which I did that was below list. It was accepted and I made a purchase. Since it involved 2 pieces , one for each speaker it shipped in 2 boxes each valued under the tariff threshold. He provided  follow up and installation support. I even received a phone call to specifically answer some of my questions. Overall an excellent purchase experience. Regards , Mike B. 

Second thought , as we’re all old 😆, do you remember “ This is a FAIR TRADE ITEM “ ? The dealer was extensively restricted to NEVER sell below list price. I remember when Loomis fishing rods were like this. The shop absolutely refused to discount the item. But if you bought say a reel and rod together they’d heavily discount the reel. About 10 years ago Gary Loomis sold the company to Shimano and all that stopped. 

My one experience is with a dealer selling a pair of demo speakers.  He wanted 2x the going rate.  He listed them regularly for 5 years, and then drop the price near going rate, and then they sold fairly quickly.

To the person expressing concerns about “slim profit margins”, I’ve been in on the financial side of manufacturing for more than four decades, and I can tell you without exaggeration that once it gets to the retailer there’ve been a few markups. Manufacturer to distributor, distributor to dealer, and sometimes more. Each adding to their “slice of the pie”. Roughly a 2X or more at each phase or step if averaged out over the entire transaction.

For EXAMPLE ONLY:
  - Manufacturing cost= $1,000 x 2 = 2,000 to the distributor
  - Distributor cost = $2,000 x 2 = $4,000 to the dealer
  - Dealer cost = $4,000 x 2 = $8,000 to the consumer

Again this is just rough averaging it across all parties, but in any case, you’ll never see the real numbers. There’s no obligation to tell you. Even if they did give you a number, it can’t be relied on, because just like scales of economies drives the manufacturer to dealer cost there’s also the deals they cut above and beyond for quantities. I guarantee you that at each level, those buying 100 vs those buying 1 or even 10 are paying a higher or lower price at each stage based on quantities commitment. Never mind other Incentives. They’ll all tell you that their profit margins are slim and that their barely making any money; that’s just sales and marketing talk.

If new, I’ll call to chance a significant discount. Many audio dealers offer discounts.
If used, I’ll suspect something is questionable- they could simply state a price with make an offer.