Quoted from Jeffster:

Just hope what has happened in the auto business doesn't happen to pinball although I'm afraid it is already. If you want to get sick to your stomach just log into any Ford Bronco forum and you'll see what many of the Ford dealers are doing to their customers. Folks that made a reservation and paid a deposit for their Bronco well over a year ago are arriving to pick up their Bronco only to discover the dealer has added an ADM or market adjustment of thousands of $. In one case $56,000 over MSRP!. Usually $5-$10k over. They don't care if the customer walks since someone else will pay it. The worst part is the dealer wouldn't even have the car if the customer hadn't reserved it since it's allocated based upon orders. I understand from my distro that Stern has initiated an allocation process for them too. I'm afraid you'll see more and more of distro's charging "market adjustments" and not hiding from it. Lucky I have one that isn't one of those....yet.

Quoted from KSP1138:

I don't know why Stern doesn't just set pricing for each model of a given game at release and then stick to it. They should be good enough to forecast what they expect to pay for parts, and if they need to set the price a bit higher initially then so be it. And this doesn't completely lock them into pricing, because they could always come out with a super limited edition and charge more for that if the demand is there. Each game released would have its own pricing based on the market at the time of release, parts required, etc. and ideally would have some order guarantee that you will get a game at that price eventually. If the orders they receive exceeds what they want to commit to building then they could at least tell people at the end of the order list right away that they are out of luck instead of making them wait months.
I don't have any issue with them setting the MSRP at whatever they want. I do have a big problem with them taking orders at once price, not delivering after months of waiting, and then forcing people to chose to either pay more or cancel.