While some people in this world prefer to believe whatever salespeople tell them, others like me have the opposite attitude. Trust me, I wasn't born with that mindset, I developed it over forty plus years through experience on both sides of the fence as a consumer and as a person who dealt with dealerships often in my line of work. There was a time when car dealers made very tidy profits just on car sales and didn't sell all the snake oil products. Then runaway inflation occurred in the 70's and this thing called sticker shock came into play when car and truck MSRP's shot upward and sales fell like a rock. One response at that time was that manufacturers lowered the dealer discount (MSRP less Invoice) structure significantly in order to keep the MSRP increases in check while the manufacturers still increased their prices. Overnight the dealers were making about half as much as before, and these days many small economy cars have less than 10% profit built in to MSRP. Since the car business is super competitive and any customer with an internet connection can easily find dealer cost for a particular car, making the big bucks selling cars takes more work. Enter the paint and interior protection packages, the add-on tape stripes and spoilers, the obligatory trip to the "Business Manager" during the sale to have financing, service contracts, etc. shoved where the sun don't shine, etc. While I always say thanks but no thanks to all those various things, I at least understand why the car dealers do it. Since Harley started replacing the old time motorcycle dealers with people from the auto sales business back in the 90's, more and more of them have brought those same business practices with them. So it's not surprising that they throw some accessories on bikes in inventory and then jack up the prices well above what the bike is worth, push financing that includes a nice big commission for them, push ESP's that also pay them a nice commission, and now even the so-called protection packages that are more than 90% pure profit.
If people are lazy and just want a one stop shopping experience, they will pay dearly for that convenience. Every one of those extra's, assuming they actually want them, can be obtained for less elsewhere if people care to take the time to arrange their own financing, wax job, accessories, service contracts, etc.
Jerry
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Topic: Harley Paint Protection (Read 6461 times)