Snap said:
I would DEFINATLY worry about a store that is selling a 500 Receiver for hundreds of bucks less.
I wouldn't worry about it. Except maybe for the esoteric brands, your well known brand names have a huge markup at the retail level. An “authorized” Denon retailer can selling a $1500 DVD playr, A-stock, for about $1000, including shipping to your front door. They wouldn’t be knocking $500 off the price if they weren’t making a fair profit. That gives you an idea of how much
over-priced Denon equipment is. Same for Yamaha, Marantz, etc.
It some times makes me mad when people spend hours checking out gear, looking, getting advise from a AV store, and then going out and buying it on line just to save a few bucks. Pretty soon there might not be a place for you to check out all that new gear other than BB and CC!
To put it another way, you could shop for the best price, reward the seller offering the lowest price by purchasing from them, then go back and give your local retailer cash for the difference between what you spent and what you would have spent if you bought locally. That should make everybody happy.
We have been over this before, California does NOT permit a manf to limit warranty coverage based on location of purchase. Any electronics purchased from a California seller has the warranty intact, regardless of what the manf would like you to believe. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the manf is going to honor their obligation, so you should think about how much of a fight you are willing to go thru, should the need arise, and you bought from unauthorized dealer.
Black market refers to items that are sold and are contraband. It is stuff that is illegal to sell.
Gray market refers to items that are intended to be sold but are not contraband if they are sold. They are stuff intended for sell in a country other than the country they are being sold in, like all those really cheap Panasonic plasma displays you can find for sell online (see
www.lcdtv.com). Gray market items are not necessarily covered by warranty, and they shouldn’t be.
Items that are intended for sell in a country but sold by unauthorized dealers are just cheaper stuff. They are not [insert color] market items. In the United States, in the interest of protecting the consumer from price gouging, a manf is prohibited from controlling the retail distribution of their product. An authorized dealer can sell product to an unauthorized dealer, who can in turn sell it to the consumer. Furthermore, a manf cannot set minimum prices for their products.
Fair Trade Laws in the United States, a former group of statutes that permitted manufacturers to specify the minimum retail price of a commodity. The first fair-trade law was adopted (1931) by California. Intended to protect independent retailers from the price-cutting competition of large chain stores, such statutes were originally nullified by the courts, which found most fair-trade rules in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act . As a result, Congress passed (1937) the Miller-Tydings Act in order to exempt fair trade from antitrust legislation. In the late 1950s, however, many manufacturers began to abandon the practice of setting minimum retail prices, largely because of the difficulties involved in enforcing such agreements. With the post-World War II rise of bargain outlets for a wide range of consumer products, fair-trade laws became increasingly unpopular and were repealed in many jurisdictions. In 1975, federal legislation eliminated the remaining fair-trade laws.
The fair trade laws (actually, anti-fair trade laws) do not specify a means, just the end. In this case, the ‘end’ refers to having the item + warranty sold at a minimum price, a.k.a. M.A.P. If the manf does anything to interfere with the seller’s ability to price the products as they please, the manf is in violation of federal law(s), federal anti-trust law(s), and probably state law(s) as well. Obviously, it hasn’t stop the manfs.
