Desert Car Kings any good?
When it comes to USED parts......
How much is YOUR time worth? How much time COULD you spend on the phone...or the internet...looking for a part that would satisfy you both in price and quality. And if you did find a suitable part, how much of your time would you spend removing it from the donor car, how much fuel and expense to get yourself there to take it off, plus the fuel to get you and your part back home????
Factor all of that in, plus the price of the part in the first place, and I'll bet if you did find a fender for $100, you'd have close to $250(or more....) in it when all is said and done.
Just sayin........it ain't all as simple as it sounds.
I disagree. It is not how I choose to conduct business and I am certain it is not how you do either. i have heard nothing but great things of you and your business, product and pricing.
Entertain me for a moment. If you consider how much money they pay for these parts cars generously consider their expenses, taxes, labor etc... their mark up is outrageous.
Say they have 1000 cars on their lot and they paid 2000 (using a number from their show on the purchase price but lets be honest, parts cars are 500 and up)each for them you are looking at 2 million in expense. Add in labor say 35k a year for a staff of lets say 7 is $245k (total 2,245,000) Lets be idiotic and say that their taxes are 100k and their licensing, power, water, webpage, advertising is 200K (2.445M to round up 2.5m) Also using their show as a numerical reference a car in parts is worth $5k. 5000x1000=$5M. So according to the math that is a profit of 2.5M. Now I am a realistic person and realize this is contingent on selling every part you have. But that being said, my numbers were obscene in their favor. in addition.... how much scratch is coming their way from the folks at Discovery?
To me if you care about the cause, if preserving classic cars realy matters to you and youre in the business you make your product affordable to as many people as you can. With them it seems to be all about squeezing every penny they can out of their customers, which is why so many people refuse to use them. If they chose to price their product fairly they would increase their profits tremendously by doing a greater volume of business. This in turn puts more classic cars on the road, betters our hobby and is mutually beneficial.
Like with my HOA, I would love to thumb through P&L report from these guys.
If you take advantage of those who you rely on to survive you are sure to die off. If you treat your customers with respect and honor their needs and provide a good product at a good price you make more money off of a return customer and said satisfied customers FREE word of mouth advertising.