Originally Posted by dutret

It's not fictional though it may be hard for some to grasp. This lack of intelligence or understanding is why so many small business owners run their businesses into the ground(or at least make much less than they could) by making stupid irrational decisions. There IS an incremental cost for each additional sale and things like employee break time should be amortized over the sales they can make to come up with this while rent and electricity should not.

When setting prices this cost should not be considered the same as static parts of overhead and once your prices are no longer fixed it should be the main consideration when bargaining with someone who is going to go elsewhere if you can't reach an agreement.

The fact is that people who are going to look online to find the wholesale cost of something to bargain with are either going to buy from an LBS at a reasonable price or buy online if the shop won't provide one. The person who is going to go in and be happy paying MSRP or 20% below MSRP won't even take the time to find the prices at online shops for comparison let alone search message boards for wholesale price lists. All keeping the lists from being posted accomplishes is making the haggling a bit more tedious for the former and encouraging the shop to blatantly lie which wastes everyones time. We're not talking about making $10 markup here in there instead of $30 but making $100 or $150 instead of $0 when I walk out on a $500+(msrp) order.

Regarding getting to know employees. I prefer to make friends with people in situations where they won't lose their jobs for not being friendly and once friends with someone I prefer to not pressure them into risking their jobs by extending their discount to me.