Right, mikester. Pricing is a game manufacturer's and dealers play to make sales and to profit. A while back, on cars, I felt I'd cracked the code by finding online the supposed actual cost of a car to a dealer. Everyone was doing that, the word was out. Going on memory here as to what the information actually was but it purportedly involved "actual cost" in some way. Anyway, very soon dealers started using that same information. I guess prices are/were padded or manipulated in a new way. Or profit in car sales became more of a volume thing.
"My" big Kubota dealer 2.5 hrs away was right at msrp. I found them not very negotiable beyond that. But I'd heard good things about them. And more to the point, they are opening a big new branch 20 minutes from my house. The consensus from folks on here, on an off board, is I'd do better from a smaller dealer. Probably true. But other dealers are also not exactly nearby, and I wanted to get the best price from the dealer who is opening nearby.
Dealers have to make money! And we should want them them to, should want to support the services we need from them. But no one wants to be a chump buyer.
So I joined the equine program. The dealer took away Kubota's $700 equipment rebate and $1,000 cash discount. The latter was in direct contradiction to how I read Kubota's language in the equine program. But the language is mushy, and I figured I'd still do better. Bottom line: I got another $1,000 off. So I probably got a small dealer price, or possibly $500 over that.
On price anchoring from Wikipedia:
[When] an individual depends too heavily on an initial piece of information offered (considered to be the "anchor") to make subsequent judgments . . . Once the value of this anchor is set, all future negotiations, arguments, estimates, etc. are discussed in relation to the anchor. Information that aligns with the anchor tends to be assimilated toward it, while information that is more dissonant or less related tends to be displaced.
The implication is that the MSRP is heavily padded so dealers can come in below it, look good, and still make money. I'm sure that's true.