The reason why the quality & durability of mowers ( and everything else ) is going down faster than the Titanic is the general public's refusal to pay a fair & reasonable price for the products they buy .
Add to that the strange mental state where every one expects to get paid more each year for doing the same job while demanding everything they buy to get cheaper every year.
Mowers in that size have a reasonable mark up for the dealers to play with to entice you into making a purchase.
However the dealers get them on finance which is for a limited time so the closer to the repayment date, the more of a discount the dealer will offer customers.
Thus if I was faced with suddenly finding $ 30,000 to pay for the floor stock, I would be happy to let them go for cost price so at the worst, I have made no money on them .
A gambler or cashed up retailer might pay out the stock debt on the hope of making more profit than they pay out on overdraft interest.
Stock on the floor of a reasonable sized shop can easily run into a few million.
No one will shout from the roof tops that they paid full retail price for anything but every one who got a lower price will be happy to do that to show how fantastic their negoating skills are , when in reality it was nothing more than luck of timing.
This then makes people like you feel they are being taken for a ride because some one paid less than the best price you got offered.
Down here we have real consumer protection laws and it is very common for a customer to pay their $ 20 and make a complaint because 3 identical machines on the shop floor are 3 different prices and they feel they were being discriminated against when in reality, the machines were ordered a few months apart and some of them were on or over their repayment day so over weeks the potential customer had been given a progressivily cheaper price, then the week they decided to buy it , the price has reverted to the full retail price because that week the dealer had paid the manufacturer so needs to make a profit on the money he outlayed.