To be fair, BC ferries are really nice, and it's a long haul compared to the ferry rides in WA state where you're looking at $40 round trip on some routes going only 7 or less miles. Plus, 100 is in Canadian Pesos, so that's what, like, $60 in the USA?
No Home Depot? There are certain products you can buy online and they will ship to store, but they don't carry any in stock.
There is a Home Depot nearby (20 miles or so) but the national website doesn't indicate any Honda products. Most of their cultivators are electric (corded or battery) and they have 2 small gas powered ones, one by Yard Machines ($699) and another by Echo ($448). At those prices I'd rather have the Honda.
If the prices are similar I think I’d go with the Echo. Echo makes outstanding equipment and a small 2-stroke will run a little tiller like a champ.
It is a smaller place. The dealer in question serves greater Victoria (a population 401,000 but fairly dispersed) and to some extent the whole of Vancouver Island (population 870,000). There are other small shops that are allegedly Honda dealers but they're mostly rental places and the local one doesn't do sales.
Obviously you've never heard of batch production, if you had you'd not be asking silly questions.
Oh I have, it just doesn't get used the way you think it does.
So you think that any manufacturer would undermine their independent dealers by allowing Big Box stores to undersell by such a margin?
Yes, that happens ALL the time. Which is why so many small mom and pop stores went out of business. Basically the ones in business now are only there because they're not competing directly with the big box stores and so they can get away with their higher prices. Just look at Walmart, pretty much any large chain auto parts store sell oil for higher prices than Walmart. What you're thinking about is called price fixing and is illegal. That's why it's called MSRP. Just a suggested price not a fixed price. Pretty much why Amazon put many book sellers out of business. I miss Borders, that was a great store to browse in.
Bulk order discount. As Wolf359 pointed out, just look at oil prices of say Autozone vs Walmart. 3 5qt jugs from autozone is $105, or $83 if we use autozones/pennzoils $22 mail in rebate. I can get the same amount of oil from Walmart for $65.88.
I don't think you really understand manufacturer. It costs money to set up two separate lines to make 2 different quality products. In production you try to make the best one possible. If you have some kind of QC, you can inspect what comes off the line and sort it. But most of the time you can only see minor changes in a particular production line. That might be making minor changes like using plastic parts instead of metal for water heaters that go to a specific big box store as a particular run would make sense. Or in the case of Costco, maybe it's the same piece of electronics, but maybe they throw in a few extra cables or accessories in the box to add value. But it's the same product coming off the line. Look at auto parts, I get parts all the time from OEM makers but instead of having the manufacturer's logo on the part, they had someone use a grinder to grind off the manufacturer logo but it's the same part coming off the same line. Try looking up things like Six Sigma, TQM, Deming, etc. You don't get quality by running two separate lines.
Yeah, except you'd have to run two different lines. It's basically a different model. When they sell the same model, it comes off the same line.
The local John Deere / Honda power equipment / Stihl / etc dealer told me there's absolutely no difference in Honda's mowers. I bought our mower from him and he even matched the HD price. He did tell me that if I brought my mower in for service and someone brought theirs in that they bought at HD, he'd work on mine first.
Not necessarily different lines, just batches. Produce 25,000 "big-box store" models then produce 5,000 "dealer" models. Could do it but I don't believe they would bother... As you said in another post, buying volume gets the big-box stores lower cost per unit.
Yeah, there's a lot that's involved in "batches". So now you're going to make a lower quality "batch". So now that has to be designed and then you have different parameters for QC. And the paperwork. Which is why there's usually just one line. Do you even know what Six Sigma is? ISO 9000?
The John Deere 112 was a garden tractor built between about 1966 and 1974 In Horicon Wi. A tiller attachment was available as was many other attachments. I owned a round fender 1967 112 and a 1964 round fender 110. I’ll buy every 112 with tiller attachment you can come up with for $600! Get back to me when you find one for that price. BTW a Honda mini tiller and a JD112 w tiller are two completely different animals.
Are you angry about this ? I was actually agreeing with you...
