Yes I also don't mind about any of the box movers in the market, we do want people in all tax brackets to enjoy the fruits of our industry.

No matter how good you are or how good your service is or even how well planned your business is. I will guarantee you that if all the products that you currently sell are suddenly all available from mail order, online, and the local BB It WILL change how you run your business.

Many of the guys on here and many of the dealers in our industry already understand that this IS a SERVICE industry. Who are the people that can afford to pay for our services? Think about that for a second. Only the wealthy can afford our services.

So while I agree that the customer who is purchasing the system right now from crutchfeild would not be a client of ours anyway due to the fact that they could not afford our services nor the high priced systems, that in of itself is not the problem.

The problem is more like a virus. The BB/Tweeter and online dealer does not sell the same way we do, meaning they usually ONLY sell on price. They have a larger marketing budget that all of the CEDIA dealers combined so they have the ability to get the prices out there in front of people. They are in the paper every Sunday.

How this does is changes the environment. There was a day when you could sell DSS units for over $1000.
You could charge anywhere from 2k-5k on the installation. I have sold 60" RPTV product for over 10k and some up to 20K. A 100 disc CD changer was around 6k, plus 4-5k for programming (remember NSM) a single DVD player was $2k-5k. A good projector was 40-50K easy. A good Dolby processor was always over $5-7k.
Try to get the same margin levels now with the prices on all these units no where near those levels.

So if you sell a infocus projector for 5K that 2 years ago you sold a SONY or Runco projector for 50k what is the profit differential?
How about the amount of work required? While you may not need to converge you still have the same type of installation procedures for either projector, but now your profit opportunity is greatly reduced. This one fact alone is why so many CEDIA dealers have failed in the last 2-3 years.

So if you take all the other systems we install and start letting them go the way of projectors, plasmas, dss, and we let the BB/Tweeter take on the Crestron and AMX jobs I do fear for what that will do to the environment.

I agree that you are selling yourself, but it makes it much harder when you can no longer make the margins on the equipment.

And to TONY who sent me a personal message about how prices on Crestron, AMX and Netstreams are too high. Let me tell you brother, in my opinion they are not high enough. (smile) I was in training with some other dealers and the guy from Netstreams told us what the pricing was and how they have no MSRP. Some of the other dealers were very upset about it, I am not I said GREAT!

Like many of you in this forum I love it when a manufacture has the respect for the custom dealer and will protect the territory by not signing on every tom, dick, and harry, and by putting some silly MSRP. How do they do that anyway when my cost of doing business is different that yours, my overhead may be different than yours, my workforce cost may be different than yours, but yet we all have to sell the equipment for the same MSRP???? That just does not make sense so I applaud manufactures that leave the retail OPEN. Niles does on many of the amplifiers, Crestron did this for the residential market for about 3 years and Netstreams does it across the board on all of their products. Elliott from Innovative in NYC complained because he said "I can't charge more than the MSRP" So he was upset that they had no MSRP, and he did not know what to charge. Well Elliott I say good I don't want them to put an MSRP on the product I want to control the margins in my company not some suit in an office somewhere.

I heard complaints in the training with both Crestron and Netstreams because they require the dealers to purchase systems and send techs to training. Why complain, hell to me this keeps the trunk slammers and the Wesley Mullings of the world who can't afford to buy a system at bay, I don't complain I tell them keep that policy in place.

I heard dealers complain that Crestron has put on to many dealers, this part I have also witnessed and not that I am happy about that but I really don't run into to many other bids with Crestron anyway. If you do a good enough job for your client, and your client trusts you and is happy with your work then other bids won't matter to your business.


(Stepping down from soap box) anyway I do wish you all the best of luck, and I think the EXPO is going to be terrific this year.

Best Regards to all!