[pianotech] Raising rates in recession

[Susan Kline]

Chuck, I think your reorganization is excellent. There's obviously 
one thing you've learned from your 37 years of experience: you 
understand your clientele, and how they will react to hard times.

I think that in the future, once oil depletion and the trouble in the 
Gulf work their ways through the system, that cutting down your 
yearly mileage will be a very profitable move.

I'm "enjoying" a forced holiday, possibly for six months (now two 
months in) from a bout of Guillain Barre Syndrome (Miller Fisher 
variant), which totally sucks, but supposedly people get over it. It 
has had me thinking about what kind of business I want (and will be 
fit for) once I begin tuning again. This punctuation mark seems to 
offer me a chance to get caught up with everything -- house, garden, 
paper, rest -- and instead of getting shoved  from one urgent task to 
another, with exhaustion in between, I think it's time to stay caught 
up, with time to smell (and water) the roses.

Susan Kline

At 06:18 AM 6/28/2010, you wrote:
>Wally, Wim and others - The topic of pricing and scheduling has been 
>on my mind a lot lately, in that the recession has hit my area 
>pretty hard, and I know for a fact (because customers have told me) 
>that the cost of tuning is a very important factor to a lot of 
>people when they decide whether to have their annual service done. 
>For the first time that I can remember I've had people flat out tell 
>me they don't have the money to have the work done.
>
>Add to the that the fact that for me at least May, June and July 
>have always been slow, while the bills I need to pay of course 
>continue undiminished, and I had begun to to think that I needed to 
>make some adjustments.
>