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NEW YORK—Makers of everything from toys to tortillas are increasingly setting minimum prices on their goods to maintain profits and limit price cutting as retailers like Walmart Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. try to grab sales from each other online.
As a result, shoppers face fewer discounts for everyday purchases at a time when inflation is around 8 percent, and as retailers look to unload hundreds of billions of dollars of excess inventory.
For many years manufacturers set the lowest price at which retailers could advertise certain big-ticket items like TVs. They wanted to stop shoppers who scoped out an item on the showroom floor, and then went online to find it advertised by another retailer at a lower price, from buying it there....