I hear how bad other retailers are all the time <G>, so I thought I'd turn the tables and offer some advice how to be a good customer!

1) Price shopping.

Go for it. It's the American Way. But don't ask for special custom work to be done on a particular model and custom quotes from all the dealers you are price shopping. The custom work takes a lot of time to spec and the maker is going to charge the same amount to all the dealers. If you are going to price shop - use standard models to get your quotes and THEN decide whom you are going to buy from. Once you make that decision, then you can proceed with the custom work quotes from your chosen deaker. It makes the dealers and manufacturers crazy to keep re-quoting the same custom work and eats up a lot of time to have five or six dealers all chasing the same quote.

2) Identify yourself.

Typically you have a real name, then a user name for a forum, and then an email address and none of the three are all related in logical fashion. For example, lets say your name is David Smith, your forum user name is XXDEY, and your email is fastboats234@gmail.com. Its very difficult to try to keep track of three ID's for one person, so include all that info in any correspondence. And for those of you that send in an email that says "Hi, this is Jack. Remember that recliner i was interested in last fall?" Well....ahhhh....no. Don't remember, sorry.

3) Keep a running email or PM conversation.

Always keep the thread. When you don't, the dealer won't know what the prior conversation was about. I spend hours searching back through saved emails trying to recall what was written a couple of weeks and some 300 emails ago.

4) Where do you live?

If you want an accurate price quote you must submit your city/state/zip. I probably get five requests a day asking me to include shipping estimates but there is no mention of where we are shipping the items to! Please include your City and State and Zip. When you send only your Zip Code, I have to go to Google to look it up.

5) Patience is key.

Its sometimes impossible to write quick replies to emails and PM's. When there are customers in the store and on the phone, and freight trucks to unload, it takes some time to get to the computer generated material. If you send an email and follow up with a phone call two hours later asking why the email or forum post hasn't been replied to, its because yours is # 17 in the que and there's been no time to get to # 1 in the que. 24 hours is average email and PM /Forum reply time.

The more info you can provide, the faster the reply! Just some hints on how to make it faster and quicker for everyone.