At risk of sounding idiot and down votes. Can you explain me when was the last time you saw the itemized breakdown of a toy, or a T-Shirt you bought in Target/Walmart? Same is true for Nintendo, Sony, and Xbox systems. Why do we think it's fair for Walmart to not show exact breakdown on how much commission they are charging for keeping something on shelf and Google is wrong about it?
I strongly believe that Nintendo, Sony, & Xbox should also disclose their rake. However, it's also well understood that they take heavy losses on consoles that are made up on game margins. The same cannot be said for Google and Apple.
Retailers have substantial costs associated with distributing products and physical shelf space is a scarce resource. There are, by comparison, no limits to the number of apps on Apple and Google's "stores" and we know that the costs of maintaining them are quite low because the respective business units are wildly profitable.
The points you raised are the rather beguiling false equivalencies that have been propagated largely by people with a vested interest in preserving this system and averting scrutiny.
Who said anything about a requirement? It suffices to make it illegal to prohibit disclosing the fee. Businesses can decide if they want to do so. The point is that this 'invisible rake' model is being exploited to nullify free market forces in service of obscene profit. Many businesses (not just Apple and Google) have realized they can leverage this to make considerably more money than they otherwise might.
>I strongly believe that Nintendo, Sony, & Xbox should also disclose their rake.
Sorry, between this line and not realizing you were also the GP commenter, I assumed you were suggesting the markets be forced to disclose the rake pro-actively themselves.
Making it illegal to prohibit disclosing the fee is great, and at that point I don't even think you need to make the case that the industry is different than others. It's not the same as the cost, but plenty of items have an msrp listed on their packaging. You know if your Arizona Iced Tea is being sold at a higher than usual mark-up because it's not $1.
(Disclosure: I live in San Francisco and have no idea whether Arizona is actually still a dollar in other places.)
The analogy doesn't work. A more apt analogy would be to compare Google and Apple to car manufacturers who charge you a 30% markup on anything you buy from a store you drive to... But the stores have to charge you that automatically, and they're not allowed to tell you that they charged it.
For your analogy to make sense, when you drive to that store, every product you buy must interoperate with your car. Every product on the shelf was built using tools and systems developed by your car's manufacturer; every product contains a decent number of parts and ingredients supplied by your car's manufacturer.
Oh, and the Apple car has an extra trick up its sleeve: it makes it nearly impossible to shoplift, which allows products to be sold at a dramatically lower price. Potentially far less than if shoplifting were as commonplace as it is among drivers of Windows cars.
Of course the producer of the product always decides how much the customer pays. It's up to them to decide whether to reduce prices in response to the elimination of shoplifting.
Yeah, you're right that it's not a perfect analogy, but I think mine is closer to reality than OP's... There are plenty of apps (stores, in the analogy) out there that are actually designed to work on many platforms (with many cars, in the analogy), but still have to pay the store %.
The broader point is that just saying "oh, it's like X, therefore we should treat it like X!" just isn't enough for app stores. There is no perfect analogue. Apple and Google call them "stores" because they really want them to be thought of that way, but there are important features of phyiscal stores that the app stores lack, and important features of app stores that physical stores lack.
How we, as a nation and a society, decide to treat app stores for purposes of consumer protection laws is up to us... so let's be careful just blindly trusting the way these companies want us to think about them.
You say "we, as a nation and a society" except that we're most likely not a member of the same nation and I really don't have much enthusiasm for other nations deciding they know better than Apple how my iPhone should work.
Why do you think your analogy is better than the parent post? The parent post makes more sense to me. People to go stores, and the stores charge a markup. In your analogy, the mode of transportation charges the markup, which in the app store case would be the ISP charging a markup.
> Wallmart does not prohibit your product from listing its wholesale price on the label.
Are you sure that they don't? I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Walmart does have clear policies around prices of any kind being printed on packaging. And it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that if they have a policy, it would disallow printing of any price which is less than the highest price Walmart intend to charge at retail.
Unless you can show such a policy, it is reasonable to assume it does not exist. I surely have no way to prove otherwise short of finding complete list of all policies. A good indication is that neither of us heard about it so far.
If we have no evidence, it is not "reasonable to assume" anything.
Meanwhile, I'm merely saying that it wouldn't surprise me if such a policy exists, whether formally or informally. The distinct lack of any product on Walmart shelves which has a below-RRP price printed on its packaging is strong circumstantial evidence at the very least.
The fact that you mentioned is an extremely weak evidence in the light of very thin margins Walmart has (under 3%), which is more than 10 times less than the old store tax, with probably even smaller incentive to combat.
Listing wholesale prices on the product is vanishingly rare, possibly nonexistent. I wouldn't be surprised if it infuriated retailers to the point that they refused to stock your product.
Printing MSRP on the product happens all the time. Arizona Iced Tea is a prominent example.
