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Chuck Gould Chuck Gould is offline
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First recorded activity by BoatBanter: Jul 2006
Posts: 3,117
Default How to **** off the family...

On Jul 17, 2:15?pm, Short Wave Sportfishing
wrote:

Anybody want to guess what happened next?


It depends on how sharp a deal you drove on the boat itself.
If it's a model in short supply, he could have let you walk.
When you bring in your own engine and do your own rigging that isn't
very attractive to the dealership. No profit from the sale of the
engine, no $100/hour labor charge to have a $12/hour apprentice mount
the engine, no brownie points with the outboard manufacturer that the
dealership is normally affiliated with, no opportunity to pitch you on
the wonderful benefits of an extended engine warranty, etc.

If I were selling somebody a new boat with a warranty, I'd be
particularly leary of a deal in which the customer were doing his own
rigging. The customer's installation and the boat itself interface in
so many ways that the odds of heated discussions over whether some
unsatisfactory aspect of performance, etc, was due to a defective hull
vs. defective rigging are pertty high.

Then there's the unintended negative publicity in the many inevitable
conversations that will go something like this;

"Hey, Tom! Nice looking pontoon boat. But when did Wholly Smoke Marine
start rigging those two-stroke Torquemaster outboards? I thought they
used four-stroke Edselizers instead?"

"They do, but I think those Edselizers are a real POS. I wouldn't own
a boat rigged with an Edselizer. The guys at Wholly Smoke were pretty
embarrassed about having to send a truck over to their competitor's to
pay retail for a new Torquemaster; but I wasn't going to let them jam
one of those Edselizers down my throat, no way!"

******

It wouldn't be impossible for your transaction to wind up with,

"Mr & Mrs Wave, we don't just sell boats here at Wholly Smoke- we want
to get you happily involved in a totally satisfactory experience.
Based upon scores of previous sales of this model, we are convinced
that our most satisfied customers have all selected one of our
recommended engines. I would urge you to do the same. Your
satisfaction is so important to us that we would, (very very
reluctantly),
rather lose your business to a competitor than equip you with a
package that our extensive experience with this product indicates
would be less than optimally matched to the hull. If you *were*
choosing one of our recommended engines, which one would it be?"

That's shorthand, of course, for "we need the profit from the engine,
rigging, and potential f&i revenue for the deal to make any sense to
us", but it's a little easier to send and receive. :-)