>From Sy Zabrocki "Institutional Upgrade", interesting, haven't heard about that gimmick. Yes we had a university sale here in Billings, MT a couple years ago. The pianos weren't even used by the university. Some of these pianos might have been to several sales and some were probably shop worn already. What motivates a university to allow them to use their name and facilities? I don't know how the school benifited from this sale. It was said professional sales people did the actual selling. Heck, they might have been selling truckload washers or lawn movers the next week. When people entered the door they were required to register. They then had names, addresses and phone numbers. They even had baby sitters for families with small children. (If they confiscate your children you'll surely buy a piano). Those people will say and do almost anything to make a sale. During those days people who had been there wandered into our store with some wierd tales. Strange phones calls came in from people trying to pretend they wanted to know about our pianos but we knew they were just fishing for info. The last few hours of the sale was a real hoot. Sales people even followed customers out into the parking lot, tumbling the price down. Moral of this story. If buying at a university sale--buy the last hour. Sy Zabrocki ---------- From: kitster@Polarnet.com[SMTP:kitster@Polarnet.com] Sent: Sunday, November 16, 1997 2:19 AM To: pianotech@ptg.org Subject: Is this honest... Even here we have university piano sales. The last dealer to do so resorted to all kinds of interesting methods to move the Kawais, even bringing in pros from L.A. to "perform" the sale. As I recall, their first step was to glue fancy looking labels on the plates of the pianos reading "Institutional Upgrade." As it happened, toward the end of the sale when they realized how much money shipping all these Kawais back to the "lower 48" was going to cost, the prices got very good, and I ended up telling several of my customers who needed to upgrade that this would be a good opportunity... but to ignore the stick on labels. This kind of thing is ridiculous. Kit Cleworth Fairbanks
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