It seems like enkei has a set lowest price a company can sell their products for. now just because vivid might be able to give an additional store bonus on said product and rt doesn't want to break good business practice with its associates, you're calling them dicks? the only thing you succeeded here is making yourself look bad, not rt.

Your pasted conversation must be broken then or out of order. I see nothing where Erik said anything other than vivids price wasn't a good deal:

wow a whopping 4 days, impatient much? i still don't see why you're making a big deal about this. if you don't like his prices then you can shop elsewhere and not make a big deal about it. when you have your own speed shop you can carry your own line of enkei wheels and set the price to whatever you want. until then, stop being a baby over a few dollars.

I think it was a little rude to post a personal conversation to the board as that it is generally a no no on a message forum but in the end I decided to just leave it up here.

Many times consumers think it is a "free market" but what they don't know and don't see is that there are buy ins, rules, and manufacturer enforced pricing structures that we as a retailer have to abide by. Any company is free to sell at any price they like but if that pricing violates what is call MAP pricing than they are devaluing the product in that manufacturers eyes and hurting the market on the whole by doing so. Each manufacturer handles it differently with some pulling your right to sell their product if you are selling it under thier allowable pricing and some just give you a slap on the wrist but each and every one of them asks their network of retailers to keep them informed about MAP violations.

I don't have the dates any longer on the full thread of PMed replies but I hate to let anyone wait for 4 days for a reply but the fact is that we are not working over weekends and such and we are honestly a very very busy shop and we sponsor a dozen boards. Sometimes it takes a few days for me to get through a full inbox of price requests.
We sell products as low as we are allowed by the manufactures and then try to make the rest up in customer service and installation by offering package deals, installed deals, and discounts on alignments or mounting and balancing. If the customer in this case was not so quick to sling mud and communicate with us we would have likely saved him money on the whole or in the future.