While there's ben a certain amount of "pie in the sky" wishful thinking in this thread, Wim (see quote below) brings the discussion to the commoditization of pianos. And, of course, this applies to darn near every item someone is interested in buying. If the market forces didn't lead all piano retailers to discount heavily from MSRP, the little guys would still be doing OK while doing amazing prep work. Fortunately piano technicians can still choose to NOT commoditize themselves! Patrick Draine On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 1:52 AM, <wimblees at aol.com> wrote: > > I think you and I had the same experience selling pianos. I went out of > business in 2001 because I wasn't making enough profit to stay in business, > either. One prime reason is the discount the manufactures gives to the large > dealers who were able to buy pianos by the truck load, instead of 2 or 3 at > a time. Let's say the whole sale price of a piano is $5000. But if a dealer > bought 25 pianos at a time, he could get a 20% discount, or $4000 each. To > make a profit, I had to increase the price by 40%, which means I needed to > sell my $5000 piano for at least $7000. But the large dealer could sell that > same quality $5000 piano for only $5600, and still make the 40% profit, and > even less if he could afford to reduce his profit margin. The only thing I > could sell was my reputation and quality service after the sale. But since > most people didn't care about that, I lost a lot of sales. > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091128/4bb9b8ba/attachment.htm>
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