One who has not taken the time and put forth the capitol investment to become a licensed business and a properly licensed, bonded, insured contractor to whatever degree his/her state requires him/her to be. Or one who "consults" as a hobby while drawing a paycheck somewhere like Microsoft or gleans customers on the side from a licensed electrical contractor. In my opinion, if you've taken these steps you have graduated beyond trunkslammer.
Often we run into the situation where the large electrical contractor has one of his employees (probably unbeknownst to the contractor) pull a client aside and offer to do a theater or multi-room audio system for him. Almost any distributor will sell stuff to an employee of one of their dealers (not singling out AVAD here). I've stood right there in distributors listening to the conversation... " So can I buy a Denon Receiver and DVD, Monster cables, etc. etc etc" "Is this for you?" "uhhhhhhhh... yeah" "sure" "do I have to pay tax?" "if its for your use... yes" "can you just write it up under my name and not send an invoice to Sparkomatic Electric?" "....Sure" " Can you explain to me what all this stuff does?"
I'm sure many of you have happened upon the poor bastard that ended up with the system provided and summarily abandoned by this as---le. Usually the most unfortunate part is that by the time you are on site, the majority of a good clients budget has been eaten up by this punter.
That, my friends is a trunkslammer. Around here, we have one of the most prestigious dealers in the country... and they sit in their beautiful showrooms whining about trunkslammers... acting like they are the ONLY ones who could possibly design a theater environment. While they have an undeniable pedigree and do fantastic work... we have won bids over them where we were actually higher in price and the determining factor was that the customer sensed an air of snobbery and way too much time spent discrediting their competition as opposed to lauding their pedigree.
We don't even have a real showroom. We have that ghetto office (in our case behind a dairy building... not even classy enough to be over a Starbucks). Our rent is due and payable every month though. And we pay paychecks, benefits, L&I, unemployment insurance, etc, etc. just like anyone else. We tend to let our volume of work be our showroom... keeps down the overhead and allows us (and I'm sure others like us) to truly be a design service. The advantage of dealing with someone who does not carry backstock is that you don't get sold whats overstocked, spiffed or in desperate need of being cleared out.
I'll add one more thing. Anyone who ever recommends that a customer go into a store to look at product they are specifying, while not being a trunkslammer per se, is still being an as---le. You should be able to recommend product and either show it in your own environment or a customer's home... not by wasting the time of someone who is also trying to earn a living. This could be one of the things that chaps the ass of the person who HAS stuck it out there with a big showroom/store. I know it used to piss me off to no end when I worked retail.
