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Bill[_91_]

Markem wrote:
On Fri, 16 Mar 2018 20:16:45 -0400, wrote:

On Thu, 15 Mar 2018 23:51:44 -0700 (PDT), "
wrote:

On Thursday, March 15, 2018 at 10:39:37 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
wrote:

Just imagine if GM or Ford or Fiat told every car dealer selling their brand that they will only sell the cars/trucks for the price on the sticker. No dickering, no bargaining with customers. If you do then your car dealer lot will be closed before the sun sets and every car will be taken back and you will be sued in court. I'm guessing this is illegal in the USA for cars. But somehow its allowed for tools.

If they were the only tool supplier, I believe things would be
different. Festool does not have a monopoly (except on Festool tools),
as there are plenty of suitably-equivalent tools.

Not sure what you mean. Ford, GM, Fiat all make cars/trucks that compete with each other. Add in Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Subaru, Hundai, Kia from Asia. And add in BMW, Volkswagen, Mercedes, Audi, Volvo from Europe. No car dealer has a monopoly. But you can and do negotiate an individual price from every car dealer for every brand. DeWalt, Makita, Milwaukee, Porter Cable all have different prices for every tool from all the different vendors selling these brands. Only Festool has one price no matter who sells it. It is the oddball out here.

Remember Saturn? They tried the one price fits all. There's nothing
stopping Ford from doing it, except bankruptcy.

The reason Festool controls price is that it entices their retailers
to sell by service, rather than price. It's why I buy from Highland
rather than Amazon (or even Woodcraft). Highland does a better job of
stocking and selling. OTOH, if I could save a Franklin, I'd likely
buy from Amazon, or even gack eBay.

After rereading your post I think I might grasp what you are saying. Maybe. But how can Festool control its retailers and no other company or product in the USA can exercise the same control? If Festool owned, controlled everyone who sells its products, then yes they can dictate prices. But all of the vendors for Festool are privately owned businesses. They are not Festool owned sellers, distributors. All of these companies sell Festool and a thousand other items. And I'm sure they compete on price with everyone else on all these other items. I guess SawStop is similar to Festool. I think, not positive, that SawStop also dictates a price for every saw they sell and that is the price. No competition for SawStop on price. Odd that Festool now owns SawStop.

Others don't *choose* to control their retailers. Festool certainly
isn't unique, either.

Having a set retail price also offers the retailer a set margin.

That would make more sense to me if the product was sold online only.
Certainly the costs to be retailer in CA differ from those in OH, and
the former could probably deal with the higher margins better. Think of
the cost of the tool as a percentage of the price of a typical house in
an area.