Okay, it sounds like most of you don't work in retail. First off, if the MD rep was rude to you, IMO there is no excuse for that. But, from a retailer's point of view, I don't see how you can expect a discount from any company regardless of how much money you may be spending. Sure, there's no harm in asking for a discount, but if they say no, then that means no. Why complain about it and try to hurt their reputation? Was there any wording that lead you to believe that you would receive a discount on an order just because it was $2000? If they claimed to give discounts and didn't give you one that would be a different story, but in this case you went in asking for a discount out of the blue. Also, when you call a large company like this to place an order, you are commonly talking to a sales rep, who has no authority to make any discounts or price changes. And to be clear, $2000 is a lot to you or me but not to any major company. Remember, it is $2000 out of your pocket, but the retailer only gets a small % of that as profit, the rest goes to the manufacturer. If you were ordering a large quantity of a single item, this would be different, as many manufacturers order price breaks for large quantities. But again, not all companies do this, so you can't fairly expect it for every product. Your next complaint I don't really understand. You show MD's price and competitor's lower price for certain items. So what? People on this thread have posted that MD is good about honoring the price matching (excluding salifert). So either order something with a price match, or order it from somewhere else. Why complain about it? There are so many factors that go into pricing I won't even begin to list them, but that's the nature of retail. You can't expect a company to have lower prices than every other company on every single product. As far as the Salifert test kits go, these online retailers have huge warehouses full of stock. Some retailers have higher turnover rates than others. Maybe MD has sold out of their older, low price test kits and only have the newer, high price ones now. Maybe the competitor has a bunch of the older, lower priced test kits left that they are trying to quickly move by offering the lower price. This is only one of numerous possible reasons for different pricing. You can't complain about things like that when you have no sufficient background or evidence about it. As far as the Tunze products go, you are right that a lot of companies have a MAP policy. But you are wrong when you say that retailers can sell at any price they want. This is not true with every company. Certain companies want you to sell above a certain price, and if you don't then you lose your account with them. Now I have no idea if this is true with Tunze, but I bet you don't know either. I hope this gives some of you a small insight into the world of retail. Not everyone will have the best pricing on every item. I mean come on, there's a reason why there are still mom and pop shops around. There are so many more things to consider when buying something other than the lowest price. To make attacks against a company because they don't have the lowest prices around is juvenile and pointless. Now, the customer service is a different story. I think good customer service is the backbone behind any good retail business. If you had complained about that and stopped your post there it would have had a lot more merit, IMO.
