The bottom line of the two kinds of company policies (fixed price and
negotiated <- notice how it's called acc. to my books) is the following:

- A large company that operates on a prospected market and sells volume
can afford and usually does use a fixed price (with some elasticity built
in - i.e. quantity discounts).

- A small company that operates on an unknown low volume market and does
not sell volume, usually sells by negotiated price. The bonus is 'more
flexibility'. The price of this flexibility is usually enormous (in $$)
in the end.

Both methods have pros and cons. The 2nd (the one you do not like),
emphasizes a 'personal' contact, more possibilities for later direct
marketing (your Kelley), and requires less PR, advertising and mail-out
money. It is unusable from the moment when they start selling more than a
few 100's of something, unless they franchise out the representative
network, and build a distribution tree. imho this kind of marketing is
going to die with Internet commerce catching on. Customers have too many
options with fixed price companies, to even bother with an email enquiry
to a 'negotiating' web site. As you have discovered, Mark, negotiating
means person-to-person contact, and seeking it if it is absent (Kelley).
The people who do this, are on sales/franchise bonuses and they won't let
go. Why don't you tell her what happened ? BTW you could have haggled
imho ;)

The 1st is the way to go for impersonal over the shelf products with
reasonable sales volume (i.e. make it and forget it - also applies for
things like electronic kit projects which all fall into about the same
'category', even if you make about 5 a year). It is associated with
respectable initial PR and advertising costs and near zero thereafter.
When a product is no longer selling more PR is invested to revive it or it
is removed from the offer. This is the best way imho, including for online
shopping, and is extremely easy to set up and maintain assuming one uses a
WWW provider with e-commerce support. Most online shops (that do not close
down soon after opening) work like this afaik.

hope this helps (memories from marketing courses),

Peter