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Originally Posted by TechieSam
Why would Lego have any say in the fees charged for Vex or FRC in the first place!?!? Isn't it FIRST's job to look out for the best interest of the teams, not the for-profit partners?
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Why would placing FTC in a particular market position at a price point higher than FLL necessarily be against the best interest of the teams?
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Here's what I would consider selling out - if Vex, the FTC partners and others requested that the team fees be $200 or lower for Vex to make it more affordable for more teams to join FTC and they were told the price for Vex must be higher at the request of Lego, then that is selling out. That is price fixing and that is what I consider selling out. If you think it's ok to raise the prices on FTC or FRC teams just to make Lego look more affordable to potential FTC schools, then I would disagree with you. That should be up to the schools to decide, not Lego or Vex.
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I would like the program to be free. FIRST isn't going to do that. I am not happy, but I choose to live with it.
Price fixing is when a group of two or more vendors gets together and agrees to have the same price for the same good or service. A single vendor can set their prices to any level they want, but that's not price fixing. It might be "dumb pricing" but it's not fixing.
What should be up to the schools? The choice of robotics program, or the registration fees charged by FIRST? I would say that schools can already choose whatever robotics program they like, and that they will not be given control over FIRST's fees.
For what it's worth, in the world of a robotics team budget, $75 is play money. On a 10-person FTC team, that's less than the cost of a movie ticket per person. If each one downloaded eight fewer songs from iTunes they could pay the extra $7.50 and still have enough left to buy a newspaper. Without the cost of going to championships, our Post spent more than $3,000 this year on our three FTC teams, and with championships added in our families and sponsors will have spent about $10,000. The "extra" $225 we spent over the cost of FLL registration just wasn't a big deal. We spent almost twice that just on t-shirts. It might be a sell-out, but not one that really costs very much.