Fender fined £4.5m for price fixing in UK .

[doombass]

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/22/guitar-maker-fender-fined-45m-for-price-fixing-in-uk

It's not only in the U.K. Several years ago I heard that especially Fender was trying (and the way I see it succeeded) to set minimum prices in Europe. The reason would have been to protect small dealers by keeping their profit margin at a level where they can survive the competition from the big European online dealers. Suddenly the small stores could price the instruments the same, just over and sometimes even slightly below the big ones. Mostly you could go in to the local store and have the price matched to Thomanns price on just about any brand/product which was nearly impossible 10-15 years ago, so I'd say Fender are not alone in this case.

[Dave W]

Minimum advertised price policies are used by almost every manufacturer selling in the US now, and not just musical instruments. It's not considered price fixing here b/c a store can still sell for less than that, they just can't advertise it for less.

Obviously that's not so in the UK.

[doombass]

It even seems to stem from EU laws.

The European commission fined four sound system manufacturers for similar behaviour in July 2018 – Philips, Pioneer, Asus and Denon.

[wellREDman]

It even seems to stem from EU laws.

they wont have to worry about it for long once we become Europe's Singapore