Re: Price Quotes
What happens is some shoppers think they're clever by printing out a quoted price and then walking into their local store - presenting it and asking for a price match. This infuriates their local dealer who now has proof of another dealer's pricing handed to him by a potential customer. Does that dealer re-evaluate his pricing models? Heck no - he gets on the phone with the supplier and raises hades, and then reads off the numbers or faxes them in. The local dealer has money tied-up in floor inventory from that brand, probably has helped that customer in the store explaining product and showing samples, and is rightly upset. Why should he invest his equity and manpower in a line of goods if he's always being cut in price by someone out of town? Its a very viable argument.
Now the supplier doesn't want to get into the middle of all this, but if the cranked-up dealer is big enough, and mad enough, or if he hears it from several dealers one time too many, that supplier MAY contact the dealer offering better prices and ask him to change what they are doing in some manner. Sometimes there is not even a phone call to that dealer, they just get a letter in the mail telling them their dealership is terminated in 90 days or they find themselves de-listed as a dealer on supplier web sites or suddenly being slow-shipped.
If the dealer on the receiving end does get a call has two choices:
1) Be a team player and take some pressure off the supplier or,
2) Tell the supplier to go pound sand and take his chances on losing his dealership due to 'marketing realignments' and the like.
An example: For a decade I was the largest dealer in the world on D.R. Dimes & Co. furniture. I also had the best prices anywhere and shipped all over the country, even overseas. Eventually enough dealers made enough complaints about my low prices that D.R. Dimes set a minimum selling price policy into place that I declined to comply with (I felt the mandated selling margins were too high and it would cripple the volume of sales). That made for tension and bad blood between myself and them and eventually led to me voluntarily terminating my dealership with them in 2001. The ultimate loser was the retail customer, who lost a chance to buy this product at a good price. That minimum price policy remains in effect with Dimes to this day.
Moral of the story? Sometimes its best to do your price shopping quietly to preserve the status quo and not rub it in the face of another dealer. The dollars you save in the long run may be your own!
Duane Collie
Straight answers from thirty-six years in the business.
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