Price Agreement? (on products)

[Duckhunter]

I am buying a product from an AI factory and selling it in my stores across two cities.

In city one I can not change the price - it says "Price Agreement"
In city two I can adjust the price as I want (I am the only retailer of this product in city 2).

I have not seen this before. Can I set a price at my factory to force other retailers into a price?
Where do I see that I am locked in?

THANKS.

[WilliamMGary]

Once three or more stores are selling the item at the same price it forces all other retailers into a price agreement.

[Esoteric Rogue]

Price Agreements occur when the manufacturer of the specific brand is also one of the retailers. Price agreements will occur between 2 or more retailers provided that one is the manufacturer. Price agreements do not occur between any number of retailers as long as one of them is not the manufacturer.

The two cases to consider are 1) why would the manufacturer allow a higher retail price than his own retail, and 2) why would a retailer charge more than the manufacturer's retail price?

Neither is very practical.

1) If I'm the only supplier of eggs, and I retail them for $5.00, I would not tolerate my competitors selling my own brand of eggs for only $3.00 because that would be taking significant number of sales away from my store. The internal sale setting being off states that my business has already decided it's okay for competitors to sell my eggs. So, rather than me stopping my supply to them every time they lower their price for my eggs, it's logical to have an automatic arrangement where they cannot sell my eggs for less than I do.

2) The other end is that it is not usually sound for an external retailer to be charging more than the manufacture's retail price. Even if you could eek out some profit for the time being, as soon as the manufacturer dropped his prices, you would be devastated unless you were constantly monitoring his price. Hence the price agreement feature saves a lot of micromanagement for human players.

There is a way around price agreements, which is by re-branding via a private labelling unit.

P.S. Since I cannot find this mentioned in the instruction manual, I will add it to the wiki.

[Duckhunter]

That makes complete sense now. Thank you!