Canon EOS Rebel T5 DSLR with EF-S 18-55mm Lens
- Model: 9126B003
- A Canon DSLR with full manual controls! Boo-yaa!
- 18MP sensor, DIGIC 4 processor, 18-55mm lens
- 1-year Canon Warranty
- And in the unlikely event that Canon gives you any trouble because we’re a price-breaking “unauthorized” dealer, we’ll cover it with a 1-year warranty of our own
We're just a flyspeck on the MAP.
Amazon can do anything they want, right? A big, vast organization like that, with everything from warehouse robots to Washington lobbyists at their disposal across several continents: anything we can do, they can do better.
Except sell Canon cameras cheap.
You see, Canon enforces MAP pricing. Every authorized Canon dealer has to sell their products at the same prices, so giants like Amazon can’t use their vast scale to undercut the local camera shop. And that includes any Amazon discount outlet like Woot, which is part of Amazon. (Sorry again about that, Woot fans - if we knew then what we know now…)
But us, we’re small. Small enough that we don’t need steady access to huge quantities of Canon cameras, like Amazon does. Small enough that we can shrug off MAP pricing. When we find a stash of discount Canons in the wholesale market, we’re free to sell them at whatever price we want.
That freedom can turn ugly when it’s exploited by skeezy creeps like Abe’s of Maine. According to complaints posted at consumeraffairs.com, they’re free to advertise really cheap Canons, then call you up after you order one and say, whoops, that’s the Japanese model, we’re gonna need to charge your card for another 100 or 150 or 500 bucks to get you the legal American camera. Oh, you want to complain? Sure. By the way, real nice credit score you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.
Scum. And they’re not even from Maine.
Big isn’t always bad. Amazon is constrained from selling you this camera below MAP price by their size - but they’re also constrained from ripping you off like Abe’s of Maine. The authorities are watching. Amazon has investors to answer to. They can’t just fade when the heat gets too high and pop up later under another name. They’d never get away with bullshit like that, and it isn’t worth it to them to try.
Superman can shove planets around. But when the Justice League needs to wrangle a rogue microbe, they call the Atom. We’ve been small and we’ve been big, and frankly it’s more fun being the ant that can go where the elephant never can. We just hope we remember that lesson the next time somebody offers us the chance to go big.
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Canon EOS Rebel T5 DSLR with EF-S 18-55mm Lens 192
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