Access Denied when using Product Catalog

Hello all. As the title suggests, I'm having weird issues when consuming the product catalog. I have 2 site collections. One that has a product catalog. The other is a publishing site that connects to that product catalog. When I'm logged in as administrator, everything works perfectly of course. But users with read only privileges get access denied when they click the managed navigation.The weird thing is that if I grant the user Contribute permissions, everything works fine. All pages are checked-in and published.

Here are the steps I took. Let me know if I'm missing something:

On the catalog site:

1. I modified the term set group to allow site collections to consume it
2. I added the terms I needed
3. I added items to the product catalog with no photos
   
4. I approved all of those items
5. I granted Everyone read permissions on the catalog site
6. I went into the catalog settings and published as a catalog
7. I enabled anonymous access on the catalog
8. Ran a full crawl

On the portal site:

1. I granted Everyone read permissions
2. I connected to the catalog
3. Checked-in and published the catalog reuse pages
4. Ran another full crawl (just in case :) )
5. Log in as administrator -> it's all good
6. Log in as a user with read permissions -> access denied when I click navigation (which should show catalog items)
7. Grant that same user Contribute permissions
8. Log in as the same user -> it's all good

I have to be missing something...or this is a pretty bad bug. I can't give all my users contribute permissions. Thanks in advance for help!

Lester Sconyers