Re: I try hard to support my LBS

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 09:10:38 GMT, "Mike Jacoubowsky" <MikeJ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


>An example of things we no longer "subsidize?" Cotter pins. There's no way
>you can justify, to the customer, what a cotter pin for an old crank should
>actually sell for, after you go through all the time of finding one that's
>either right or close, and perhaps having to grind it down to fit. So we
>don't sell cotter pins, period. I donated our entire collection to one of
>the local organizations that donates bikes to charities, so we no longer
>have a salesperson saying "We might have one of those" and, literally, this
>really happened, leaving the salesfloor on a busy Saturday and spending half
>an hour (again, literally) with a mechanic, trying to make something work...
>and charging $1.50 while a whole lot of customers didn't get taken care of
>and eventually left.

I do music electronics repair. We have a wall covered in small transistor bins,
shelves and shelves of tubes - despite all of which substitutions and
proprietary part numbers must be researched - and brother I feel your pain. We
routinely debate counter parts sales, "Worthy traffic builder or Abject waste of
time of someone who could be earning money." People just don't pay for parts
research unless it's built into the price of the part - of course someone will
have it cheaper online.

>But none of that has anything to do with a lack of communication, or perhaps
>even honesty, where a customer is told something will cost "x" and then
>charged "y." That's the sort of thing I lose sleep over in our own
>operation... I hate anything that will surprise a customer unpleasantly.

True. Maybe I'm being unfair to the original poster here, but the guy who is
"stunned" that it would cost "a couple of bucks" sounds like the guy who hears
"a couple of bucks" when what is said is "it won't cost much." We've got those.

Anyway, if people want to be able to walk into a place and buy parts and get
service, they have to pay enough that the owner of the business puts his money
into inventory and rent and payroll instead of money market funds. That includes
subsidizing the parts that don't sell and the time and overhead that are
underutilized.

Ron



>--Mike Jacoubowsky
>Chain Reaction Bicycles
>www.ChainReaction.com
>Redwood City & Los Altos, CA USA
>
.

Relevant Pages

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