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Gerry's Is Getting An Equinox Delivery Tuesday!


mn90403

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No this cost me one pint of blood and to be sure I’d get it on time I gave him a hot check. You call that a five finger discount. I was told it was good to two hundred feet but I need a brave guy to test the depth for me.

Chuck

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I don’t want anyone to say I don’t support my dealer. Don’t get me wrong I’m not doing anything to help him but just don’t say it.

My dealer did post his order is on the way but said he couldn’t say how many he was getting.

I still don’t know if my name is on one. So you wag is good as my wag.

Chuck

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14 minutes ago, Ridge Runner said:

I don’t want anyone to say I don’t support my dealer. Don’t get me wrong I’m not doing anything to help him but just don’t say it.

My dealer did post his order is on the way but said he couldn’t say how many he was getting.

I still don’t know if my name is on one. So you wag is good as my wag.

Chuck

If you notice, there are no dealers on this thread.  You also got the same answer from your dealer as I did from mine.  He can't say how many he will be getting or how many anyone else will be getting. (Minelab controls that info)  Also, some dealers have their allocation sent directly to the dealership and then they send it to the customer.  Some are sent by the distributor (middleman) or Minelab but they need to have the customer list in order to do this.

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20 minutes ago, Wayfarer said:

I never said Minelab was "forcing" this on dealers.

If the presumption was that Minelab distributed more units to dealers who had more pre-pays vs. based purely on preorders, prepaid or not, then that in effect is forcing this on dealers.  It would logically follow that the dealers might feel obligated to distribute detectors in preference to prepaid customers because that was the condition under which they got "more" detectors.

Regardless of whatever Minelab or the Dealers did or did not do with respect to prepays, what is important is finding the dealer whose pre-order conditions you are most comfortable with and pragmatically realize what that may mean in terms of when you will actually get the detector.  I personally favor trust, transparency, and an even playing field over expediency that comes at a price.  The great thing is we all have great dealer choices and you can choose what suits you best in a dealer-customer relationship.  Just hoping many get their detectors soon so we can start seeing some varied user feedback.  I can live vicariously through that.

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Not everything in life we have control over. I do believe that if you want to be a dealer for Minelab you will operate within the limits they being Minelab sets . I do know to be a dealer for them you have to sell a set number of detectors each year. The reasoning behind this is one has to sell more than to keep himself in a new one.

You can spit out the law but you can do it my way or the  hwyway.

Chuck

 

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1 hour ago, mn90403 said:

Did the dealer ask you to preorder?  Or rather Pay at the time of order?  (Everything is a preorder!)

If this detector had a closed coil you could dig and detect at the same time!

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1 hour ago, Wayfarer said:

I never said Minelab was "forcing" this on dealers.  Let's try to explain it this way.  Let's say you are Minelab.  Your dealers are reporting a total of 10,000 preorders, yet your first shipment is only going to be 500.  What do you do?   First off, you know that prepaid orders are firm orders that have been placed at one dealer by one customer wanting one detector, so basically a sure thing that the accountants and shipping departments can count on.  Contrast this to an unpaid preorder.  An unpaid preorder only takes a phone call or an email to make, with no commitment of money.  That means it can be cancelled at any time.  This is MUCH less certain, so should carry much less weight when allocating detectors to individual dealers.  The dealer that has 20 prepaid on full orders vs the dealer that 50 unpaid orders, who are you going to allocate more detectors to? 

Additionally, many prospective purchasers have placed multiple unpaid preorders with the intention of seeing which dealer comes through first and then will simply cancel the other orders.  I know this is going on, because many posters on the forums have openly stated that is exactly what they are doing!  And there's nothing wrong with that, it is simply one way to try to game the system, which is perfectly legal in a free market.  So that's many duplicate orders right there.

So back to the dealer that has 20 prepaid orders, which are a sure thing vs 50 unpaid orders at another dealer.  Out of that 50, maybe 10 will actually end up buying from that dealer (just guessing, but I'm just trying to illustrate my point).  Minelab would likely end up shipping twice the number of detectors out of the first batch to the dealer with prepaid orders.  

Finally, this situation of a huge shortage was not known back in September when dealers started taking preorders.  Nobody knew if Minelab would be able to quickly meet initial preorder demand or not.  The demand turned out to be unprecedented, likely catching Minelab behind the curve with production capacity unable to quickly match the huge preorder demand.  So back to what Minelab should do?  They have to decide on a fair allocation among dealers and the dealers that have a large number of prepaid preorders are going to get a higher allocation than dealers who do not.  And we're talking only 1-4 detectors per dealer, so even many of the prepaid preorders aren't going to be filled in this first batch, and the individual dealers are going to have to start at the top of their list and work down.

The dealers that took prepaid preorders were probably just more savvy and had a better idea of how large the demand would be versus the initial supply and wanted to do right by their customers just in case there turned out to be a shortage and knowing how basic supply chain management works.  If these dealers were being overly cautious and it turned out everybody was going to get their preoprders, prepaid or not, in the initial batch, then there would be no harm no foul, everybody would be getting their detectors.  But just in case there was a shortage, these dealers who had their customers prepay, ended up being the smart ones since it was entirely forseable that should their be a shortage, the fair way to allocate would be by looking at the number of actual prepaid hard/confirmed orders.  As it turned out, these dealers were the savvy ones, because when it came time to allocate a tiny number of initial detectors, Minelab did end up taking into consideration how many paid up-front preorders each dealer had.  They may have even asked, but not demanded, that each dealer take care of their fully paid up front customers first, which only seems fair.  

This seems totally logical and reasonable to me.  

Minelab has no idea if a customer paid dealer or not.  Not their financial relationship.   Minelab fills distributor orders.  Distributor fills dealer orders(still doesnt know or care who prepaid).  Some distributors are great and will drop ship individual orders that were back orders (pre orders) instead of send to dealer because they rock and want happy dealers and ultimately end users.  I suspect some of you with UPS tracking is coming from fort worth area.  Best distro in the country.

Minelab did do extra work with distributors to determine individual dealer quanties to ensure everyone got one first then a percentage of some kind based off total after that.  Hense some dealers got 1 and some a few.  They dont normally do that and went the extra mile in my opinion. BUT guess what.  They still had no idea or care who pre paid or not.  They get paid from distro on their own individual terms not end user.  Its not rocket science.  Pretty straight forward.

 

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When I ordered my Equinox from the dealer the term pre- order was never used. I just told him what I wanted and he said how much with that it ended. He didn’t ask for anything but it was my idea to send the money to him  My thinking I’ve got it paid and I don’t have to come up with the money later. I just said ship it when you get it.

I have no way of knowing how many paid up front or they just want it to him. If I was the dealer and the guy before me said he wanted one and his word was like money in the bank he’d get it first.

You may feel different but that’s me.

Chuck

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Have just been notified by a very qualified, near to the action, right in the hub, closely linked to the manufacturer source that all dealers worldwide were provided with 5% of their pre-ordered stock - not necessarily pre-paid, just pre-ordered. 

If the dealer ordered 100 they got 5.  Ordered 20 they got 1.  Any dealer under 20 pre-orders got none.

There, now we all know.  Can we stop talking about it now :huh:

The whys, how, wheres, whos and whats of how they get to anyone's door has been the most discussed, boring, not adding anything useful to the discussion brain drain that I have experienced since being on the forum. 

And you can suggest that "Maybe you should just not read the forum Northeast".  The fact is I read the forum every day (actually twice per day :wink:) in the hope of actually learning something new about the Equinox or any other detecting tid-bit that sparks my interest and that generally means I read everything on a couple of Steve's sub-forums.  And about 5 pages of this thread is assumption, hypothesis and guesswork about something completely unrelated to how the machine works.  And this is one of many threads that are very similar.

I am sorry for my rant.  But I honestly reckon I've wasted a couple of hours in this sub-forum reading all the threads and getting to the end of many not knowing any more than when I started.  This is obviously not directed at you Steve as you certainly have provided masses of quality information and I thank you for it.  And it's not directed at any one other person either.  Just be nice if the guessing stopped, we patted those on the back as they receive units and we start getting widespread feedback, multiple user analysis, comparisons and more answers that will promote more questions that can actually be knowingly answered - not hypothesised.

This is my first and possibly only rant and I feel cleansed.  Feel free to delete this Steve if I'm being too harsh.

 

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