Posted by Mark Goodge on 06/17/07 16:39

On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 08:54:19 -0600, Scott Bryce put finger to keyboard
and typed:

>Mark Goodge wrote:
>
>> That depends where you are. It may still be legal in the US, but
>> setting a minimum retail price has been illegal in most of Europe for
>> quite some time.
>
>Interesting. So, if I am a small business owner, and my products are
>only available through me, I can sell at any price I want to. How would
>that be different than price fixing? After all, I would be determining
>the price, and nobody could buy at a lower price.

Someone could buy from you and resell them at any price they want to.
They could, if they wanted to, even resell them for less than they pay
you for them. That might not make obvious business sense, but it could
be worth doing if, for example, they bundled your product with another
one in such a way as to make a greater profit overall than the
individual loss they make on reselling your product.

However, that's not really relevent to the question being addressed
futher up the thread, and what is being addressed is being conflated
into two separate things. As Jerry has already pointed out, there's a
difference between a supplier setting a minimum price (aka Retail
Price Maintenance, or RPM), thus preventing their resellers from
competing on price, and a group of resellers agreeing among themselves
not to complete on price. The former is legal in the US, but not
necessarily so elsewhere in the world, while the latter is usually
illegal everywhere that has a concept of anti-competitive practice.
But neither of these have any relationship to the right of a
manufacturer of a product to sell it at whatever price they decide.

Mark
--
http://www.BritishSurnames.co.uk - What does your surname say about you?
"All this talk of getting old, it's getting me down my love"

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