Come on dealers you have seen the thread,NOW tell us why!
Where to start....
Having been involved with selling hifi for 35 years now i have seen a massive change in the way things are sold
As a young man i worked as a Saturday part time assistant in a well known chain in the 1970s , most of my day was made up of putting cartridges on turntables SP25 MP60 AR Dual , and we would have a queue of buyers waiting to collect there new systems, all for less that £500! Having a hifi system was a quintessential part of growing up and a major purchase for most.
Many look back on these years as the "good times"
People mainly viewed the hifi mags and made there decisions based on what was the flavor of the month, in those days you really had to show the prices to get people in your shop....
Then next thing that happened was they way that people started to buy hifi changed, Linn Naim Rega had revolutionized the way we listened to music and turned the market on its head.
This is where the pricing of products started to become more of a "Grey" area as then the mere fact that the customer was in the hands of a so called "audio Consultant" and was being told this what you should buy and if you cant hear the difference then you must be deaf! The price was a closely kept secret until the dealer made the customer feel so insignificant and that if he wanted to buy into this so called "Clique" the price was the price and no discounts.
We then saw this escalate even further buy the introduction of "Hi End" audio products being distributed buy various flamboyant characters, who in there own right put large profits on for themselves and made the mystique of owning a big lump of Americana hi fi a must.
At this point i must add we were given price lists that were put together by the distributors and given much smaller margins that we were getting off UK manufacturers, thus making it more difficult to discount goods at realistic levels.
Then the internet appeared and things started to change fairly rapidly for all concerned, when you could look at a website half way across the globe that were offering much more attractive pricing on these luxury goods, and i saw more and more customers buying stuff from overseas and importing it themselves.
This was the beginning of the "Audio Revolution" and more and more so called "Audio consultants" started feeling the pinch
Along with a new breed of Computer/ipod buyers and a recession ,interest has dwindled in the last 6-7 years
It made for sobering decisions to be made
Why have i got all this money invested in all this lovely equipment and no one wants to buy anymore?
Why have i got this fantastic facility that no one wants to visit anymore?
Do i become one of the many faces of the way hifi is now sold ?
Just on endless lists of garbage that most of them dont have in stock...
Well not my style im afraid, everything on my website is in stock! And is demonstrated in a professional way
And i pride myself in constantly keeping it up to date on products and in some cases pricing too!
We are in fact asked by some of our suppliers not to advertise prices
RRPs are shown by many out there as a guideline to what the price should be ,however in my experience the whole thing is a sham as deals are done offline anyway.
The products that i stock and represent in the main are not your typical "Click and buy" items
I can see that it would be frustrating that products that are deemed to be so, and on other websites are not shown with prices
But thats usually down to the shops not having a online sales facility.
Anyone who wants a price on a product that is not shown on our website please call and we will give you our price over the phone.
Or if you dont want to phone then email us.
Kind Regards
john