Kawai's University program

[Mark Story]

Hi Bob,

>I was notified that we'll be meeting with the Kawai people today, about
>their program to put Kawai's in our University. If any of you are familiar
>with this program, I'd appreciate hearing your opinions and what kind of
>problems I might need to expect, along with any advantages. I'm not that
>familiar with the program. Our chair is hoping, mostly to replace a lot of
>old Wurlitzer studios in the practice rooms. . .which sounds like a pretty
>good idea to me, but I don't know if the dealer insists on doing the
>maintenance, if they end up eliminating our good pianos too, etc.

We looked into this program when they first started it. It may be different
now, but at the time, the proposal was that they would take our exitsting
inventory, have the dealer liquidate it and supply us new pianos every year.
After each year's cycle the local dealer would have the responsibility to
conduct a sale to liquidate that year's inventory.  We decided not to sign
up because we would get no guarantee of any piano inventory if Kawai decided
to terminate the program. In other words, they would sell our pianos at the
start and we would be entirely at their mercy for instruments from year to
year.  If they decided to terminate the arraingment for any reason, we would
be stuck without any pianos. Of course we could _buy_ the pianos at the end
of the year... get real.

At UI (Idaho), they also considered it, but my father's objection was
(besides the above) that he would have to break in new pianos every year.
This might be a problem, but we did make another purchase deal with Kawai
and ended up with a couple of UST7s, and my experience with these would
lessen that as a factor (they were pretty tame right out of the crate).

Mark
Mark Story, RPT

Eastern Washington University        |  mstory@ewu.edu
Cheney, Washington, USA                |  mark.story@phunnet.org