Outer Limits 4x4 Board

you will probably find they damage your gear as they are under such pressure to do it fast as their is minimal profit per job, go to an exclusive type of service providor and pay top dollar and they will be more likely to care for you and your gear.

Blanket statements like

Making profit on products is not where a business will succeed

are rediculous. I offer the best service i can to my customers but if i dont make money on what they buy - why bother.

do you honestly think charging $200 per tyre and $50 for the service, is any different to changing $240 per tyre and $10 for the service?

Yes we are in a haggling driven market, the question is why do people think that because your a small independant opperator who gives decent customer service they should bargain, but walk into a big chain store - woolies, annaconda, repco and pay off the shelf.

I expect some customers to haggle with me, but remember that every $ discounted (saved by you) is a dollar lost by someone else, so whats fair for you isnt always fair on others.

hense the comment above 'better for who - better for me'

but its a never ending argument - some retailers do anything to make the sale. others maintain margins. some people bargain, some dont.

its attitudes of 'bugger them how dare thay make profit for getting me what i want/need' which are the problem.

When you ask for a $50 discount you are asking someone to take $50 out of their pay cheque.

If someone came up to you and asked for $50 out of your pay cheque im sure you would tell them to get stuffed.

business need to make profit or they cannot exist.

I haggle wherever I can.

Even supercheap as in your example, and yes sometimes it works! I even asked at ARB and got my EZ deflator cheaper.

Places that almost always give discounts when you ask are electrical goods stores, camping shops BCF, car yards (new and 2nd hand).

Bunnings, officeworks and many other stores even have policies that they beat prices by X%. So I don't get the big problem you have with asking why the store down the road is cheaper. Fact is a larger store should be cheaper because they CAN sell 10x more tyres than a smaller store. Isn't that why woolies is cheaper than fruit markets, butchers and corner stores?

Call me a tight ass if you want, but if I save $15k more than you in a lifetime then better for me!

Also, if I ever did ask a shop for a discount and the reply was "sorry mate that's the best we can do" if the price was ok and I needed it I will buy it anyway. If the answer was "this isn't the Sunday markets" I would without doubt go somewhere else.

I don't go to the store and ask for the best price, then walk to the next one. That's what the phone is for, so you take your car down, and they damage it, not because you have been a grump to them, its because they are incompetent (well atleast the ones I have had the misfortune of using, and I can identify each shop I have used and what product I have pucharsed)

Spend a little extra time putting the tyre on and you won't damage things. Not bloody rocket science is it! I'm sure if I walked around the corner and took a screw driver to their rim to replicate the damage they would not be impressed either.

So i generalised a bit, making a margin on products will keep a business going, but if you rely solely on products to operate then your soon going to fail in this market place. Australian resellers need to pull their heads in and realise that if the consumer can buy a product internationally and have it delivered in some cases sooner than nationally then they are soon going to be working for the man again, the business will fail.

If you can sell me a tyre for $200 instead of the $240 I'm not going to pay you $50 to fit it, so I will request the $200 price + $10 to fit.

I'm taking it that some people will not even go to sales, as they want to pay the full RRP so to make sure that someone, somewhere, gets the money they deserve.

I just bought a 54" Plasma, it was $1200 off RRP during a sale, its now back to RRP a week later. Should I go back and give them the rest of the money? Surely someone, somewhere needs that extra money

South wrote: if you rely solely on products to operate then your soon going to fail in this market place.

Then where are businesses that sell products expected to make the money too pay the wages, rent/repayments, maintence costs etc if they make FA on the products? Especially when that makes up the bulk of daily sales. A couple of rotates at $40 each isn't going to go far to pay the daily expenses.

But if you feel the need to try and bargain every little last cent and spend extra time and resources to get that then go ahead, I'm quite happy to go to the same shop I have been going to for the past 4 years and pay what ever the charge me without questioning the price because I know the price the give me is a fair price and the service is good

After sales service is where money is at, ongoing maintenance pays the bills. Alternatively if you are purely a product sales business, then repeat business with a high turnover of products will give you the money you need for business expenses. Low margins, high turnover = profit. If you have a niche product then high margins and high turnover will make your wallet even fatter. Automotive industry rarely has niche products so as a company you are bidding for work against other companies.

If you rooster up the first time with the sale, your not going to get the repeat business, be that through word of mouth (very powerful) or same customer.

Million/Billion dollar companies put work out for Tender, thats the same thing, getting the best price for the same product. If they can do it, why can't the consumer do it?

I have plenty of time to shop around, I work 40hrs a week, I sleep on average 50hrs a week, so if it takes me an hour to save a couple of bucks ($50 a tyre times 6 tyres is a bit of cash!) its hardly going to kill me.

Dog eat dog world, competition rules, only the fit survive.

Each to their own...