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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 1631043" data-attributes="member: 151">The market doesn't work that way, as I understand it.  The distributor gets the item at a significant discount, and then sells it to the retailer at less of a discount, getting his profit from the difference.  The retailer, in turn, sells the item at MSRP or possibly at a discount of up to 10%, generally.  No one is seeing huge profit margins in that equation.  Amazon and Walmart can give big discounts because they buy in huge volumes that no one except a distributor like Diamond can even approach...and even they can get that close.  If you've got a retailer who's charging 5x over the price being charged by the publisher to the distributor, or even the retailer...there's something very wrong there.  I know that Wulf Ratbane has posted some details on the economics of RPG books, and no one would be charging even as much as you think they are.  Infrastructure to print, store, ship and distribute those books costs money.  Do you think that anything over the price the publisher charges is cheating you?    Yes, but let's be fair here: paper is much more expensive than it used to be, was b/w throughout, and was the product of a single author who often operated in the danger zone, prior to having a break-out hit on his hands, and who's business dealings certainly had their fair share of difficulties.   Setting aside the fact that RPGs and cars are radically different, I think you're completely ignoring the concept of scarcity.  Take a good long look at ebay, and I think you'll find that not everyone agrees with you, on that point. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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