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It's not just astronomy gear either. There's a publisher in Canada of specialist books on aviation history (another interest of mine) from whom I used to order regulary, and directly.
Then they appointed an exclusive Australian distributor and told me I had to buy from them. Not only would that have made each of my orders take much longer (everything I ordered had to be reordered by the Australian distributor because they didnt keep stock on hand) but the Australian prices were more than double what I was paying to order the books internationally.
I protested to the Canadians but were told basically, too bad you must order from the exclusive distributor. So what I did was find a US bookshop that was happy to order and ship the books to me for the same price as I had formerly being paying.
Net result, instead of me buying direct from the publisher and them getting paid retail, now I buy the same books from a US bookshop, pay them retail instead and the publisher gets only wholesale from the bookshop. All because they were greedy.
Books don't need warranty support, so when it comes to complex things like telescopes I can see the sense in having local agents to provide warranty service, but whenever I see an exclusive agent appointed I start to wonder if that's going to result in monopoly profits being extracted from my wallet. The best arrangements seem to be manufacturers like WO who do not appoint sole agants and who still give you the option of ordering directly from the parent if you wish.
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