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To: Joan Osland Graffius who wrote (140860)	12/29/2001 7:29:07 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 436258

are having pricing power with the high end margin part of the business (supplies). When I think "pricing power", I think of the ability to push through higher prices while not giving up market share. You can do this in an environment where the economy is expanding and there is strong demand for your product. The fact that these companies are pushing prices up in a recession with declining margins and declining top line tells me that it is basically an inflationary price increase and they will give up market share doing this. They are doing this out of desperation. Their fixed costs and labor costs have been rising incrementally for years while the prices they could charge for their products has remained constant or dropped. Now, at the worst possible time they are saying, screw it, we need to raise prices otherwise we're not going to survive. The last time we saw this kind of price increase was in the seventies.