[fabsroman]

Trust me, there is a difference in prices between Outdoor World and Cabelas. When I was in law school, I used to create spreadsheets of items I wanted, scour the catalogs, and post who had the cheapest price and what it was. Outdoor World/Bass Pro/Redhead rarely made it on the spreadsheet. A couple of places beat out Cabelas on certain items like Lock, Stock & Barrel and MidWay, but for the most part Cabelas had the cheapest prices I could find.

As far as them making their prices the same, they do not do it because they don't want the other to lose market share, they do it because if they didn't they themselves would lose market share. Retailers can approach the price issue a couple of ways. They can undercut the competition to gain market share and then merely match the competition once they have a good market share.

Purdue used to drive start up chicken producers out of the market by lowering his chicken price to the extent where the startup could not afford to compete. Even if Perdue suffered a loss for a couple of months, he had enough reserves to withstand it and he could then make it back up once the competition was gone and he could raise prices again. The retail world is cruel. Heck, the service industry is cruel too. Oh yeah, don't get me started with manufacturing.