With a lot more companies going to a capped discount model (or the company cut of the retailer or tells the distributor to do it) could it be they've hit a point where they can't run these sort of sales any more?
Maybe the major companies are doing that, but a lot of the FRP sale stuff is junk from manufacturers that are either small operations or out of business. I doubt they'd make enough of a fuss to care.
If I had to guess maybe they're having some personnel shuffle so the normal sales update guy isn't doing it? Or categorizing all the stock just got to be too big a pain in the butt.