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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Randy B. Singer" data-source="post: 1892999" data-attributes="member: 190607">The answer is: "Because it isn't in their best interests to."Let me explain.  Many years ago I worked as a car stereo salesman in a private store.  I learned a lot about how retail works from that experience.  Specifically, I learned how a big company maximizes their sales and keeps all of their retailers happy.  They do it by what is know as "protecting their channels."Now, if a company, for example Sony, has a car stereo that has lots of desirable features, great performance, and a great wholesale price (which means either that the retailer can sell it for an attractive price OR that they can sell it at a good margin), they could try and offer it to every channel (specialty stores, electronics stores, department stores, discount stores, online, etc.) as a particular model number.  Let's call it model A123.   But if they did that, there would cause a huge amount of competition among many retailers.  They would all be forced to sell based on price to attract customers.  That would ruin the profit margin for every one of these retailers.  In time, some retailers would find this unprofitable, and they would stop carryiing this Sony model, and maybe all Sony products altogether.So, how does Sony deal with this?  They create different entire lines for each channel.  Sony could just call the same unit by a different name for each channel.  Specialty stores get A123, electronics stores get model B123, etc.  The problem with this is that consumers will see through this rather quickly, and Sony would be back having a competition problem among retailers again.So Sony gets smarter.  Model A123 has it's own cosmetics and feature set.  Model B123 has different cosmetics and an ever so slightly different feature set.  Etc.  Suddenly, each channel is selling a product from Sony that only their channel has.  It becomes extremely hard for consumers to comparison shop, especially based on price (as there is now little to no local competition in a geographic area), and competition between retailers is minimized.  All of Sony's retailers are happy, and Sony maximizes the number of retailers who are selling their product.This concept goes even further sometimes.  For instance, the "discounter" channel might tell Sony that they need to have a product that is in a certain price range for their typical customers.  So Sony cheapens the product (sometimes both physically and feature-wise) so that they can drop it's wholesale price, and the retailer can now meet a certain price point.  The once fine product may thus becomes a POS compared to the same fine product sold through other channels.  Very similar Sony products specs-wise, sold through two different channels, suddenly aren't even close to being equivalent.  (Remember how I  previsously recommended that you never purchase a Canon printer from Walmart, even though Canon is a company known for making some excellent printers?)You should note here that in thie above scenario Sony has no incentive to tell you what all of the different models it makes are, and what the feature set of each is, and every incentive to withhold that information from you.  They are protecting their channel partners.A few years ago, Brother had an awesome Web site that explained the differences between its many models really clearly. They totally re-vamped their Web site a couple of years back, and now it's a b___h to figure out the difference between all of their models.  I guaranty you that they didn't regress in this regard by accident.One time I was looking to purchase a new vacuum cleaner.  I was told that Panasonic vacuum cleaners were really well made.  My local vacuum cleaner shop, all by itself, had too many Panasonic models for me to make sense of.  So I wrote to Panasonic for some guidance.  They must of thought that I was a distributor, or something, because instead of sending me a consumer brochure for one channel's lineup of models, they sent me a sheet listing all of the models that they made, for each and every sales channel. Holy ****! They had, literally, hundreds of models!Which is all a long-winded way of saying that it is unlikely that you are going to find a good source of guidance to *all* of the different channel models that one manufacture offers.  The manufacture, the distributor, and all of their retailers, all equally don't want you to have any such thing.</blockquote>

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