This is what I see happen in Poland with clothes and electronics stores, but I don't exactly understand what MAP is supposed to be solving here, given that the brick&mortar and on-line stores are literally the same entity/brand, and in case of clothing, they're also the manufacturer brand?
Manufacturer does not want that, because then it will lose most of it's distributors in Germany.
NB: Though I am not debating if it's right, fair or best for consumer. Just mentioning, what I've experienced.
If I know I can go online and it'll be some % cheaper, I'll wait and order it online, defer my gratification for a few days, and end up with a cheaper product.
Not sure about Poland, but most B&M brick and mortar stores in the US are distributors/resellers of the brand, they buy for $4 and sell for $10, and their rent/labor/etc costs $3 and they profit $3. Another distributor let's say is an e-commerce website, they can setup a warehouse in a rural area with cheap labor so it costs them $1 and they profit $5... so they can afford to discount it to $7 and make $2... which the B&M store can't do because they won't profit at all.
I remember hearing our marketing folks talking about enforcing MAP, at the company I used to work for. That company didn’t have the clout of Amazon, but we did sell premium kit.
For us, it wasn’t about money, as much as we didn’t want to ever be forced to reduce Quality; which included the shopping experience. We were concerned that outlets selling lower-priced kit, also had a worse shopping (and support) experience, which we believed (probably correctly) would reflect on us, and our most favored retailers.
Premium brands are often driven by factors other than just money. Brand reinforcement is a really big deal.
You're interested in Quality above all else, fine.
You're upset that you have competitors who don't care about Quality, fine.
So you make your website harder to use, so that... what?
I was just sharing my experience.
But it's not the manufacturers that do that. It's the cheap-slingers. It's their Web site that has the "click to reveal price" button.
Um... and? That's quite literally "the market working as intended" and while I am not a free-market apologist by any stretch, that seems to be a rather benign effect.
What makes MAP especially suspicious in my eyes is that it's the manufacturers that seem to be overly concerned over well-being of one specific kind of their downstream buyers/distributors/resellers, not those distributors/resellers themselves. I understand that if B&M stores would try to impose that, then the FTC would (hopefully) smack it down pretty quickly but apparently when a manufacturer mandates the price to the resellers, it's perfectly fine? Somehow? Isn't there collusion somewhere in there, probably?
Historically, you only paid for that service when you bought something, since most stores can't convince you to pay an entrance fee. When you go to the store to select products and then buy online, you're leeching on that service and putting the entire business model at risk. If everyone did that, brick-and-mortars would go out of business and you wouldn't have access to that service, which sucks for everyone.
I do think that by not having physical stores, it directly/indirectly promoted a decline of product quality as well as misrepresentation of product, with Wish and Temu kinda exemplifying that to an extreme. Price differentiation is way greater now which I guess is a net positive to the consumer.
As a brand owner of midtier kitchen products (cheaper versions of designer OXOish products, but more expensive than your baseline Walmart stuff), our products look visually similar enough to both ends of quality, but shines more when a person gets to interact with the items themselves, feel the product texture, press the lever action, etc. So I do value B&M for their place in the economy and want to make sure they can have some margin (even though I'm selling the same thing in my Amazon store and Shopify and can make more money there).