Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if each channel was allowed to set their own price, you'd end up with brick and mortar stores doing a lot of showrooming and then online stores gaining the bulk of sales because they're cheaper (because their overhead is low). 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 especiall…
The problem with "the market working as intended" is you get unfortunate second-order effects. The brick-and-mortar is providing a valuable service by letting you browse, try things on for fit and style, feel the material, and hypothetically by curating products and trying to engender trust in their curation, only selling things of at least passable quality (some more than others). Historically, you only paid for tha…
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).