Yamaha Loan Program

[twinter@mercury.sfsu.edu]

Danny,

We've had a loan arrangement with the local Yamaha dealer for a few years.
I'm sure there are numerous advantages to this arrangement, but none spring to
mind at the moment.  We have four grands and eight uprights, which represents
about a tenth of our total inventory.  During the discussion phase, the dealer
agreed to store the instruments that were replaced, but somehow it never
materialized.  As a result, we have a bit of a storage problem and the number
of pianos we are maintaining has increased (not that I'm complaining, but it
does stretch our limited resources a little further).

The real problem is that all of these shiny pianos sitting around the
department has lulled the administration into a false since of security, and
the piano replacement program has disappeared.  I keep telling people this
arrangement won't last forever and that the problem of old, worn out pianos is
only getting worse, but they don't want to hear it.

Oh yes, one other little problem, everytime they have a sale, they sell all of
the uprights and leave us a bunch of (non-Yamaha) piano-shaped-objects to fill
the empty practice rooms while they order some more pianos from the factory.
Three to six months later the new Yamahas arrive, usually just about the time
we get the PSO's to stay in tune.

I don't expect this arrangement to last much longer, as the total income from
the sales has been declining, and every year the dealer says it may be the
last year.  I might add that this is generally true when viewed on a national
level, too, or so I'm told.  This year our dealer started thinking about the
sale a couple of months before the proposed sale date, and then was astonished
to learn that the areas in question were scheduled for every weekend for the
next twelve months.  By the time they had that sorted out there were bad
feelings on both sides, and this will probably help put an end to the
arrangement (I stayed out of it, I tend to hide in my office when manure is
hitting a fan).

Tom Winter
San Francisco State University