Let me get this right. The Coolpix S01, recently announced, finally ships and NikonUSA puts it on a 17% discount with free shipping at the online Nikon Store? If a brand new camera needs that big a discount to sell, something is wrong.
But here's the thing: the entity that suffers here is your local dealer, who paid more to NikonUSA to stock the S01 than Nikon is now selling it for directly.
A few people keep saying I'm only writing negative news about Nikon. Maybe you ought to look at the source of the news: Nikon is generating negative news near constantly now. For whatever reason, NikonUSA is in full-squeeze mode, squeezing customers, squeezing dealers, squeezing everything they can find to wring out a few more pennies. And here it's to sell a product online at a 17% discount from the price they announced just one month ago.
The good news? You can buy 10 of them at this price (well, actually 20 if you placed two separate orders a week apart). Hmm, I wonder if there's an arbitrage position (buy in the US, sell overseas)? If you wondered how Gray Market happens, this is one of the ways.
Update: NikonUSA did extend the instant rebate to dealers selling the S01. But the problem is still the same. When the S01 was announced, dealers put in orders for the unit at about US$153, their cost. By the time the product shipped, NikonUSA asked dealers to sell them for US$150, promising them a ~US$25 credit when they filled out the proper paperwork for sales of the unit. In other words, a dealer basically gets about the same amount in cash from a customer as they gave to NikonUSA, then gets a credit from NikonUSA for a slightly lower than expected "profit," and the likely scenario that this will all play out all over again with the next released products. In other words, dealers are fronting Nikon money. They've done this before, but generally not on just-announced, just-released products.