Music Trade Review

Music Trade Review -- © mbsi.org, arcade-museum.com -- digitized with support from namm.org
THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW, DECEMBER, 1U0
can live selling $195 pianos, nor can
any department store do it; nor can
co-ops do it and they claim to give
their gross away. For a piano dealer
to advertise $195 pianos and then sell
them, he would be more gullible than
old boy Guliver, himself. What is the
difference losing a sale to a department
store or to another dealer, the loss
being the net result in any event if
dealers are not on the button.
D
ON'T forget that piano buying
is something that is thought
over for a long time—esti-
mated to be 2 years of think-
ing and shopping prior to the sale
close. There is plenty of time prior
to the sale for dealers to get in their
talk, either advertisingly or personally,
and they can make some mighty tough
competition — if they want to — to any
and all. Naturally, a few suckers are
knocked off via sale ads by department
stores, but not enough prospects in
percentage to be an irritation. People
who know dealers as "Music Houses"
will buy pianos from piano men, just
as men now buy clothing from clothing
shops. In spite of competish from
department stores.
R
EPORTS from 4 furniture
stores — big ones — on their
piano work: New York, good;
Boston, fair; Pittsburgh,
lousy; Detroit, improving. One outfit
put in pianos twice during the past few
years, and has also thrown them out
twice, meaning they wouldn't take on
pianos again until hell freezes over.
True is the fact that the easiest piano
pickings for furniture, department
store and other dealers are in the cities
wherein is the weakest piano dealer
competition.
M
ORE annoyance from ye
lobscouse editor:
how
would you like to sell 231
pianos in 1 month, of which
42 were sold in 1 day? Total busi-
ness, $70,000.00 — average sale
roughly $300 — and of the 231 pianos,
only 3 were the advertised specials.
These sale figures are accurate, but the
whale of a sale caused so much com-
motion that the instruments couldn't
be delivered in the month. Even 231
pianos in a year is a good job. This
month's achievement of 231 pianos is
probably a record for 1940 — just one
store, too — and is a great tribute to the
art of intelligent advertising promotion
and skilful salesmanship — and good
pianos, too.
H
OW do piano dealers know if
their tuners do the right
kind of job or not; how do
they know but what a num-
ber of persons in the city are not only
resentful of how their pianos were
tuned, but that it interferes with per-
sonal endorsements of their store?
How do dealers check trouble, or what
is the percentage of visitors who were
poorly handled at the store and who
vowed never to "go into that dump
again"? Who checks up on all the
trouble that is constantly arising, not
the outspoken complaints, but the
worst kind — those that say nothing to
dealers but say plenty to others.