The manufacturer sets the price that he needs to to make his profit, and then the retailers buy his goods at that price if they choose, and then decide their own prices for the stock that they now own and that works for them.
I’m glad that my favorite canned chili doesn’t price fix, I have found that Walmart sells it much cheaper than Albertsons, and cheaper than on Amazon.
I have always assumed that MAP is about protecting branding by protecting the high value (high price) image of a product (oooh, it must be better because it cost more than brand X, and never goes on sell).
Once a MAP product loses it’s artificial propping up as a high priced premium product, then it’s retail price eventually becomes more reflective of it’s actual worth.
If a manufacturer wants to determine the sell price of it’s products after it is bought and leaves the factory, then they need to open their own chain of stores, that they run or franchise, and that they sell out of, and keep their product out of the rest of the market place, like McDonald’s does.
If I could go to the various hamburger factories and buy all their hamburgers at a wholesale price, then I might open a hamburger store online or store front where a customer could buy a McDonald’s, Denny’s, Burger King, In and Out, Jack in the Box, White Castle, burger, but if the burger chains ever allowed their product to go free range like that, and sold directly from the factory to individual non-affiliated global-burger places, then I would not expect them to control the pricing by my business.