Literally the only reason to display a retail price on the website is so sales reps can say "see we are giving you a massive XX% discount!"
I’m looking at buying some fortigate firewalls to do some natting, looks like 200Fs will be fine, but even the fortigate sales guys won’t give me a price, I have to go to resellers who also refuse to give prices, which adds friction. Cisco exactly the same.
When looking at options, price is at the forefront of my mind, but sales guys want me to choose their company, and even commit to the specific device and numbers, before I even see the price.
Almost walked away from the fortigate option until I found avfirewalls which gave me a ballpark idea of what I could afford to implement, and what trade offs. The benefits of the fortigate over a mikrotik were worth it at that price, but it was painful getting the price out and they nearly lost the sale as I assumed it would be 10 times more.
Ebay has them for 3.2k and CDW new for 3.6.
- Hospitals have an interest in massively inflated high sticker prices to make as much money as possible from those who pay in cash, e.g. foreigners, and to make the debts look better for collection agencies - basically, assuming the true cost of a procedure is 1000$, when the hospital bills 1000$ and that goes to collections who buy the debt for 10% of value the hospital gets 100$, and if the hospital bills 10k $ and the collections agency pays 10%, the hospital gets 1000$ or the actual cost
- Insurances have an interest in high sticker prices because they will negotiate with the hospital to pay true cost + some markup anyway - so with a higher sticker price, they can claim that their insurance saves the buyers a higher percentage
- Employers have an interest in high sticker prices because they can market themselves as employers who provide a better health insurance than the competition
The people losing out in this gamble are those who cannot afford insurance and have to declare medical bankruptcy.
And in the case of hardware or even some "contact sales for a quote" SaaS it's the same end result: the ones who lose out are small businesses (who can't achieve the sales amount to qualify for cheap-ish rates), and the big companies with dedicated account managers have a nice life.