Seller beware-an educated buyer will look carefully at his choices
I just took delivery of a new car equipped with everything needed to make driving not only a pleasure but also safer, and I immediately drove to my cell phone provider to trade my GPS-equipped phone for another that has GPS and Bluetooth capability.
“Oh,” the sales representative says, “This phone is not Bluetooth compatible.”
“Why?” I ask naively.
“It’s not available on this phone model.”
“When will it be?” I ask hopefully.
“Don’t know, it’s up to the cell phone manufacturer, and before you ask I have no idea if they ever will”.
“Let me get this straight,” I say, exercising my famous restraint dealing with incompetents. “If I want GPS and Bluetooth you can’t supply it? Does this bother you?”
The answer I get is a look that says why should they.
“Well,” I say, showing remarkable composure as my internal temperature soars, “I guess an option is to visit your competitor who does offer both.”
His response is a shrug, followed by the advice that I still had months left on my contract with his company and that a cancellation will cost me serious money.
So here’s my quandary. Do I forfeit money to Company A to start a new contract with Company B, which by the way does not have as much area coverage as Company A, regardless of their advertisements to the contrary, or do I forgo my new car’s hands-free Bluetooth capability that allows me to talk on the phone while driving in states that prohibit it.
Choices are what life is all about. We see product offerings but find we may have to make trade-offs to get exactly what we want.
You too have choices when you are purchasing a laser. ILS pages offer you clues to products that you may need, and accessing our print and on-line Buyers Guides offers you even more choices, sometimes on products with similar capabilities.
ILS offers you choices, not just either/or, with references to suppliers of industrial laser products that will likely satisfy your materials processing needs. This may be one of the reasons you read ILS, in print, digitally, or on the Web (www.industrial-lasers.com); the choices.
Cautions to product suppliers; readers usually have a choice, so don’t emulate the cell phone provider, and shrug off what seems like an inconsequential request.
There’s an anecdote, possibly apocryphal, about a disheveled and rather disreputable looking man who walks up to a salesman at a laser exhibit, asking what seemed like naive questions about the equipment performance and selling price. The salesman took the time, it was just before the show close, to patiently answer these questions. Upon conclusion the man reached in his pocket, pulled out a wad of bills, and promptly paid cash for the unit on the spot.
That’s what markets are about, choice; only this time the choice was the salesman’s and the buyer’s.
David A. Belforte
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