Because it’s reductive and ends up not working for the manufacturer, retailer or consumer. Like an Ortofon cartridge or a Mercedes car or even a Sonos speaker, you rarely see advertised discounts because Google makes it pointless. Screen scraping software means that someone else is a pound cheaper, instantly. Within a day or so no-one can make any money as that instantly happens again and again, making it pointless and it ends up costing the manufacturer their reputation as their products end up being sold with no service to people for whom they aren’t suitable. What happens in practice, therefore is that people advertise at SRP and discount from it on negotiation. Also, specialist companies often have retailer agreements in place that say the retailer will not mail-order certain products as they want them installed correctly. This costs the retailer time and money, so they’re less inclined to give away gross margin. In the case of Naim, John Lewis sell some of their products. Should they attempt to lean on a retailer that size regarding pricing, they’d find themselves in a very expensive legal situation quickly.
I’m not going to go round in circles here, so the last thing I’ll say is that discounts are freely available on most Hifi products, so in practice, unless you’re just looking for a theoretical argument, there’s actually no problem at all.
