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Simon Robinson <simon@simonrobinson.com> wrote:
> I'd like to think that you'd regard doing business as a bit more than
> that. There's two sides of it: A. Making a profit, and B. Providing a
> good service to your customers. Both are important.
Sorry, I don't demand all this touch-feely crap from the businesses
I deal with. I want to call them up, buy whatever they are selling
at whatever price they're asking for it, and not be bothered with,
"uh, let us check our list to make sure you haven't bought some of
these before." ESPECIALLY if I'm making a trans-atlantic call on MY
phone.
> Several points there.
>
> Firstly, I'm intrigued by the way you use the term 'serious builder'.
> I have five blue hopper cars - and I'm very happy with that. Does the
> fact that I only want five somehow mean that I'm not a serious Lego
> builder, as you seem to imply?
I didn't imply that or even seem to imply that, you just read it
that way.
Serious builders in the way I MEANT it are people like Gary or Ed,
or others who do things on a scale you and I wouldn't dream of.
Serious makes no value judgement, but perhaps I should have chosen
the words "massive-scale" instead of serious. Or perhaps you
shouldn't be picking nits and looking for an argument.
5 cars is fine. As I said I ordered NONE because I don't like
freight trains. But the trains I've seen around Knoxville, the ones
that you get ticked off at for blocking an intersection for 10
minutes, have a heckuva lot more than 5 cars on them. So I'd look
at a train with 5 hoppers and think of it as a small train. Not a
value judgement, just an observation. I'd expect a trainiac like
Larry to build a train with a dozen or more hoppers, boxcars, flat
cars, what have you in it.
As I would expect to see at one of the train shows. Kinda hard to
do that if Busy Bee decides to start playing "protect the little
guy" and limit everyone to some ridiculously low number of sets.
> Secondly, if you're in a situation where there aren't enough sets to make
> everyone happy, then which is best?
> (A) to satisfy one person who will only be happy when he has 50 of a set.
> OR
> (B) to satisfy 10 people who each will be happy to own 5 of a set.
> Assuming you can't do both?
I don't assume that Busy Bee should be worried about making people
"happy" by "fairly" distributing the sets. Are you going to write
the database add-on for them so they can flag each customer's record
with the purchase of a certain set? Remember to make it check for
duplicate CC's, last names, billing addresses, shipping addresses,
etc. After all that be sure to explain to them that if a person
really wants more, it'll be easy to get around that, but not so easy
that they might end up losing business over it since the people will
have to factor in a new trans-atlantic call for every order.
> I know which one of those I'd pick.
I'd pick the one that was the least amount of effort.
> [1] A case in point: The Entertainer is a medium sized chain of
> toy stores in the UK - and incidently another good one for picking up
> out of date sets that have been reduced. A year or so ago there
> was a sudden flurry of buying in the UK for some horrid (IMHO) fluffy toys
> called Furbies. They retailed for the equivalent of $50 but had
> been reported to be changing hands privately for 10 times that
> amount due to their being in short supply. I distinctly recall being in
> an Entertainer shop that was selling Furbies at normal retail price,
> but had a notice up saying that they would only sell one Furby to
> each customer.
Yeah, I've seen that with TRU or Target with "collectible" items.
It's up to them, and they're large enough to develop a plan to
handle it. Then again, these are things that usually appear on one
day and disappear in a matter of hours. These hoppers were
available for several days, correct?
--
The parts you want and nothing else?
http://jaba.dtrh.com/ - Just Another Brick Auction
Why pay eBay? Run your own LEGO auctions for free!
http://www.guarded-inn.com/bricks/
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