Serving the greater Inland Empire, Redlands, Loma Linda, Highland, San Bernardino, Riverside, Corona,  Norco, Eastvale, Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga, Temecula,others

WHY BUY A PIANO AT A COLLEGE SALE?

I really don’t know.  Because:

You take yourself out of the driver’s seat.  You’ve scheduled an appointment, and the salesperson is in the driver’s seat.

You’ve responded to a misrepresentation of legimitacy:  The college or university has nothing to do with the credibility of the seller.  It has carelessly chosen to ally with a traveling sales for for a weekend, for some unidentified compensation or return, and otherwise has nothing to do with the sale.  In some cases pianos might have been leased by the college, and in other cases not.  But there is an irrational implication that the sales program has something to do with the university, and it does not;  it is an imputed credibility that is entirely deceptive.  And by making the appointment, you trust this misrepresentation.

You have unnecessarily limited your time to choose to make a purchase.  The appointment involves competent sales people whose job is to close the sale, any sale.  And I have seen too many customers who didn’t buy what they set out to buy, and could have taken the time to shop further,

There is no practical way for a piano technician to inspect the piano you are considering.  The seller might say there is, and may even offer their own, but clearly you will not be able to bring in your trusted independent technician, and anyone else will be biased on behalf of the sales company.

There is a real sense that the seller is a traveling show, with all of the lack of support that is implied.  This writer has direct, first-hand experience, well documented, and you WILL get some kind of response if you have a service call need, but there is a very real and likely possibility that you WILL NOT get the response that will be satisfactory.  There will be a service call, and a claim that the work was done, but the company will frequently not do the work needed to actually fix the problem. 

You can trade in your piano and deduct a portion from your Schedule A as a donation???  Tell me you don’t really think this isn’t a racket on the edges of legal questionability, or moral ambiguity.   I’m sorry, this is a legal slight of hand that I would run the other way from.  There are a lot of legally ambiguous activities that will never get litigated because there are far more important activities for the DA, and this is one.  Maybe it’s legal, maybe it’s not.  But it’s sure ethically ambiguous.  But it DOES solve a common problem for the person in an appointment trying in 15 minutes to buy the shiny dream piano that really might not be what they think it is, but would be nice to find out if we could just get rid of the old piano....and don’t want to pay the mover to haul it away!  But any good retailer can help you with that.

The advantage of a local piano shop like  Shull Piano with an inventory of solid, sound and well-prepared acoustic pianos is that you have time to choose, time to live with the instrument of your dreams, time for a tech to inspect it, and will begin a service relationship that you know will keep the piano in top shape through regular maintenance. 

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