Dealer prep (was Re: Complete Regulation)

[Phillip Ford]

> >><<  After all, it's brand new and costs as much as a car!  Why
> >>should I have to pay another $500 or maybe even $840  (12 hrs. times
> >>$70/hr.?) >>
>
>Ed Foote wrote:
> >Because it needs it.  The problem here is that the sale people in
>dealerships
> >don't usually inform the customer that any new piano will go out of
> >regulation.  It doesn't help the sale's pitch!
>
>But he's not talking about it "going out" he's talking about it being out
>from the get go.  Brand new.  NEW.  Not used. After 6 months,
>a year, yes I would agree, but not when it's still on the floor of
>the dealership or has been in the customer's house for 1 day.
>
>Dealers don't inform the customers because they know they can
>get away with not doing this work most of the time and pocket
>the cash.  Period.  If they informed the customer, then the customer
>would rightly expect them to either fix it or discount it.
>
>-Mark

This seems like remarkably bad PR in my view.  These days if you bought a 
car that cost as much as 'the standard piano of the world' (read BMW or 
Mercedes) you wouldn't pay for any service or repair for some significant 
period of time, say 3 years and 50,000 miles, whether it's an oil change or 
a transmission change.  Your only responsibility is to schedule service at 
the appropriate times to insure that the car is properly maintained.  How 
much, on average, do you think this costs Mercedes?  $1000 per car?  $2000 
per car?  From a PR standpoint it makes a lot more sense to me to tack this on to 
the price of the car.  Is anyone paying $50,000 for a car going to quibble 
if it's $51,000?  I doubt it.  But they're certainly going to complain if 
they have to pay $1000 for service the week after they buy it, and the 
image and reputation of your product is going to suffer.  If I were making 
high end pianos I would tack on $1000 and use this to give a credit to the 
dealer and/or his/her tech to take care of any prepping and service issues 
to make the piano as it should be when it's delivered to the customer and 
to handle any problems and maintenance that come up after delivery until
the piano is relatively stable and the customer satisfied.  The dealer would be 
much more inclined to spend $500 prepping a piano if he was getting that 
$500 reimbursed by the factory.  And I would want customers saying to other 
potential customers that my company had delivered a quality product and had 
taken care of all problems in a timely fashion without charge, rather than 
them saying to a potential customer, yeah I spent $50K for the d_____ thing 
and then I had to spend another $1000 after they delivered it to get it to work 
right.

Phil Ford




Phillip Ford
Piano Service and Restoration
San Francisco, CA