Yet more reasons to dislike and avoid BTY.

I understand why you might think so, but it says something about the strength of the Butterfly brand – which is based on quality and demand, among other things – that they can still enforce these kinds of distributor territories and command price premiums.

Hey, I know it's controversial and it comes down to the old way vs the new way of doing things. It could be seen as perhaps an old-school company, with longstanding distributor relationships and networks, fighting a rearguard action to preserve an established business model. I've seen this play out from inside the bicycle industry, where a handful of strong overseas players more or less nuke domestic resellers, and I can understand why Butterfly are doing things the other way and why customers don't like it. The market inexorably moves towards a streamlining of channels – it just hasn't happened yet in this case, because it's risky and painful to disrupt a comfortable existence.

My guess is that they are critically dependent on existing middlemen financially, and the safest bet right now is to maintain that model, because of the lack of transitional income between ditching those middlemen and going to a model which is more direct or relies on fewer resellers who have more power over Butterfly Tamasu.