While it may help knifecenter, blade hq, and other similar large knife dealers, it hurts the small up and coming dealers.
If you're not an already established, well known knife dealer you could not step in and start your own business. Not when you can't advertise better prices AND better service. An up and coming business sells for lower profits because their name isn't known. This takes that away and is guaranteed to crush small guys while funneling most sales to the places like blade hq.
What's the incentive for small guys to carry inventory and make mandatory minimum sales when they have to work much, much harder? Before they could just advertise and sell the knives for 5 or 10 bucks less than blade hq or knifecenter or whatever and draw business that way.
It is the opposite in my experience.
I have little stake in online conversations like this... and typically avoid them...
But.....
The way I have seen it is; if you make the prices even, it will eventually help to level the playing field.
It will eventually draw people to shop more local and choose where they spend their money based more on quality of service and location more than saving a few dollars at a high-volume (typically) lower service retailer (which I see many die-hards are nearly religious about defending
).
A good friend of mine owns 2 local bicycle shops - a Specialized Bicycles, and Giant Bicycles dealer.
Since Specialized has enforced a similar MAP style pricing on current model year products, he has seen a sizeable increase in sales of those bikes, and many more locals now buying local. At a quick glance, it makes little sense to many people who just think of it as less of a deal.
If his prices are the same as his competitors, he has more incentive to offer above par service to gain loyal customers, so that way people no longer travel to the larger next town over to buy at a bigger store just to save a few dollars on final price (which used to happen, because the larger competitors store pushed much more volume so they could afford to undercut profit margins and still be successful.)
For us, as just individual consumers, yeah it may suck right now though (especially those of us with no local shop). But now maybe there's more possibility of seeing a local dealer pop up and hopefully thrive, because of you - shopping local because you will now be able to handle the knife in person, chat with the shopkeeper, AND pay the same price as Amazon/KW/etc.
Wasn't any need for MAP back when we all shopped local anyway. Now everybody undercutting everybody and it eventually devalues the product/service... makes us consumers happy to pay little for high value here and now, but in the long run things cannot last that way. It will move up the chain, from retailer to distributor and up to impact Spyderco, and that legacy may start to crumble if we as consumers aren't willing to pay what they value their own manufactured products at.
Like Sal said, he can lower prices if he lowers tolerances or uses inferior materials. Other than that, there hasn't been one other suggestion as to other ways they can lower prices.
