A devil's advocate view: perhaps the supplier was buying low cost appliances from China, built in factories with who knows what labor standards or whether the work was compulsory, made almost certainly to a lower quality than appliances made in North America, taking advantage of China's currency and trade manipulation to mark up the price and make a larger profit than if they had distributed appliances made in a western nation with labor and wage standards.
Now the U.S. is putting the same tariffs on Chinese imports that they put on U.S. imports to their country and the supplier is having difficulty getting Amazon to bear the cost of the supplier's desire to keep the same margin.