| Terms /Purchasing - Basic Premise | | The Basic Premise - Imagine we have a corner store near you. You walk in and ask if we have a whatever for a whatever. We say yes, hand one to you and stand ready to answer your questions. You look it over and say. "Looks good. How much?" We tell you. You pay. We exchange our thanks and out the door you go. You become a happy customer and stop by from time to time to chew the fat and we become friends. That is exactly how "we wish" we could do business with you. But the problem is, you aren't here. So we must do it "long distance" via this website, emails. etc. | | You should like this.... (I enjoy telling it to you). - Now imagine that corner store is selling audio manuals. You say, "How much is this one"? The owner says everything in the store is priced $17.99 (or whatever). You can plainly see that the one you want is only 4 pages, so you ask, "Why does this one cost so much?" He tells you that everything is pretty much the same price because he doesn't want to spend the time figuring out different prices for every item. Seeing the puzzled look on your face, he says he sells a lot of tiny little manuals like that 4 page one you want, and that he makes insane profits on them. Then he gets really honest and says, "Because I make so much money selling those little manuals to folks like you, I don't feel like I'm really losing anything when I sell the much larger manuals for less than they should be. I would rather do it that way than do all the work to put proper prices on everything". Do you think that is fair? Do you think it is right for a business to not tell all the folks who want to buy a tiny little manual that it is very small, and then overcharge for it... apparently so the next guy who wants a much bigger one can pay less? We don't. The guy buying the big manual probably thinks he got a fair deal, but I'll bet the many small manuals buyers might feel that it's kind of like buying a $3.99 bag of potato chips... then when in the car, opening it to discover it's 95% air (instead of the usual 20%-40%). Most of our various competitors in the online manuals world operate in that same manner. They seldom provide any information about the items they are selling. Most often, they list a model number with a flat-rate (or nearly so) pricing scheme. You have no idea what you will receive, whether it will be 4 or 400 pages. And there is almost never any mention of whether it will be made as the original manual or whether the quality will be Fair, Good or Excellent or even have readable schematics. | | Our entire pricing structure is open for all to see on our Price Codes page. We do not use a flat-rate pricing scheme because in the manuals business, we think it is patently unfair. In order for us to assign a Price Code, to a manual, we must examine it to see how large it is, how it is made, what is involved in reproducing it and whether our results will be poor, fair, good or excellent. In doing that, we have gathered enough information so that we can provide you with a detailed description along with that price. Call us quaint or old fashioned if you will, but we will not even give a price unless we can at the same time provide an accurate description along with an "individually assigned and guaranteed Quality Rating". Some people feel compelled to tell us our site has too much information. Please understand that our goal is to provide consistently high quality manuals, AND to provide a lot of ancillary info for fans of vintage /classic audio gear. As we get more of the site completed, it should be obvious to all that although it is primarily a manuals site, we have put enormous time, effort and money into building it in a way that wouldn't be necessary just to sell manuals. We do what we do "for you". We hope there are more folks who appreciate it than those who "just" want to see a model number and click-button-to-buy button. You DO NOT need to read everything on our site. Read what interests you and ignore the rest. We have been working at breaking up the site into smaller pages with a more simple and intuitive menu structure. We do hope you will browse around a bit and discover some of what we are beginning to put together for you. When the Manuals Catalog projects are completed, we will turn our attention to the Reference Section... we have huge plans for it. |
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