Price paid for top end equipment

Each Dealer can offer the Price he wants to have. At the moment the Business is super dead what some Dealers told me. The economic crisis hit the mid class income extremely. Expensive High End is pure luxury, some may live in a bubble, but sooner or later they wake up.
Normally when they have to pay the Rent for their Shop.

I fear that the disposable cash that some would have used to buy equipment will
instead be going to pay higher capital gains taxes or other increasing expenses.
There will be those who don't need to ask what a product costs and the rest who
will find it increasingly difficult to justify the high prices. Value added taxes may
also someday hit the US like in Europe.

I paid list price for my vandersteen 5As last summer, was okay doing that, dealers have a tough row to hoe these days.

In 2004 I bought a Cary V12R stereo amp from the owner of a local store for 30% of list,He told me he marks up around 40% and gives deals like this to larger purchases. A year later I went back and got another one (because of the discount)at the same price. Visited the store a few years later for a sony sacd player and found it was sold to another owner and now discounts were very small. So bought the sony 5400 for a better discount somewhere else, everytime I go past this place no one is there. So you give people some kind of deal and sell more or no discount and sell less.

Dave_72 you are right dealers will wake up soon with the rest of us in the unemployment line if they think they can make 100% margin (and with cable lines even more!) if they do not give "normal" discounts. I've said it before and will repeat, there are dealers that give a standard 20-25% discount and even more if you but several items at once.