Dealer Discount

A good friend of mine was the Florida sales rep for a few high end companies.  He showed me his invoices.  The dealers paid 50% of retail, plus 10% shipping on small orders.  I sold my system and bought his demo pieces.  The 38 year old collection is still working perfectly on my television system.  He did make me go pay retail from one of his store for a cartridge, pre-amp, and head amp.  My buddy got great in store discounts on SAE.  None of it survived 10 years.  I was lucky, but i quickly learned that the generally non-discounted stuff is much better.  What I always wanted to know is why some very wealthy people insist on the power play of being a dick to dealers who are bothering to even talk to them.  If you have a lot of disposable income, don't be a dick.   I was in retail.  Not one person with a Titanium AMX card ever gave us any argument about price.  Many Lambo drivers did.  

@teo_audio,
Someone needs to tell BMW to stop producing the 3 Series cars, so that it will spare their dealers a lot of headache :-) And then they should rely on only 7 and 8 series customer for their bread and butter.
I don't know which BMW dealer you talk to. But 3 Series is their bread and butter.

Disclaimer - I don't own a single BMW. And even though I can, I would rather invest it in my audio system :-)

If you are a good customer dealers will surely support you. Some accommodate trade ins to make your upgrade easier, some give bigger discounts, some give you equipment to try out etc. 

Mat
www.jjaudiosolutions.com

To make the decision to discount by the store a little more real.....


Assume a store has sales of $750k per year... or $300k net to the store assuming a 40% gross margin overall.  From the $300k comes store rent, wages, advertising, returns, financing costs, business taxes, state and federal taxes, etc...maybe resulting in $75k leftover for the owner. 


How how many of us would put up to $1M at risk to earn $100-150k per year?


Personally... I want three things... a store or an internet direct seller that has staying power....second, that they treat me reasonably.... third, that their price to me is in the ballpark of what they sell to others for. 


At the end of the day, this is value which is more important than price.