Opinions of Working For Dealers

[Barb Barasa]

I got a lot of customers doing warranty tunings for Baldwin back in the 80s.
As far as I know, they no longer offer the customer one free tuning after
delivery.  But at that time they did.  The deal was that they would send me
out to do new purchase tunings for practically nothing but I would get to
keep the customer.  Quite a few people never had their pianos tuned again by
me, but a lot became very devoted customers.  I have always felt this was a
fair way for me to build up my customer base.  I also did warehouse and
store tunings for Baldwin for (at that time) $10 each.  This was gruelling
work, but for someone starting out (as I was) it was good in two ways: it
gave me access to the aforementioned new customer tunings, and it forced me
to tune faster and be less nit-picky.  Since I was just starting out, I
would normally agonize over every string that I tuned.  I think it was good
for me to just do a large volume of fast tunings, as long as they were not
on pianos that were actually going to be played in that condition.  I would
never tune this way for someone in their home or in any other "real"
situation, but I think the experience helped to make my good tunings
gradually get faster, too.  But as I said, at that time I knew the pianos
would get tuned again at least once in the home.

I have no experience with leased pianos.  I would say that most dealers of
any type are out to cut costs, and most don't care what the quality of the
tunings are.  There are ten people in line to tune those pianos (or what
they call tuning) if you don't want to do it, so you probably have no
leverage.  Seek out a more ethical dealer if there are any in your area.

Barb  Barasa
Sycamore IL