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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Jackson who wrote (13975)	5/23/1998 1:36:00 AM
From: HerbVic	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213177

Yes Bill, them was good old days in the good old days. Trouble was, at the time we just didn't appreciate how good it was. Well, it was mostly good anyway. ... Sorta good. ... Uh,... At least we were younger then! If I remember correctly, the dealer margin at MSRP was 32%. Volume buyers at the next tier could get 34%. There might have been another 1% in an even higher volume tier, but I didn't see any of that action. I was the salesman for a local Mom & Pop store in Tyler, Texas. Before we became an authorized Apple dealer in Tyler, we would drive to Dallas and buy from one of the big chain store discounters. We could buy 5 deep discounted Apple IIe computers at a time, but we had to promise to come back for more in order to get the deep discount. Our margin came in around 22% to 28%, depending on their urgency to unload stock. Then we applied for recognition as an Apple dealer to get the full margin. Apple's requirements were expensive. We were told that we had to move into an upscale storefront, hire a repair technician, get bonded and purchase a minimum stock level across the entire product line. When we had jumped through all those hoops, then they told us to present Apple with a proforma business plan for the next 3 years. No one in the store wanted to tackle the proforma. The store owner was ready to throw up his hands. He was tired of their demands, and this was "out of the blue" and really made him mad. I told him that if he could show me what a proforma looked like, I would write him one, then we could go on about the business of selling computers. So, he called the rep and got a copy of someone's old proforma. It was a spreadsheet income and expense report on a monthly basis projected 3 years into the future. At that time, I had never seen a spreadsheet program. We had VisiCalc on a BMC CPM machine so I got busy. It was much easier than I though it would be. Only took me about three days between waiting on customers. We ran it out on a TI dot matrix printer that takes that green striped, wide tractor feed paper. Apple accepted it and we moved into our new store. Made good money for about a year. Then Apple decided to introduce the student and faculty direct purchase program. It wiped out half our volume. But, we hired another salesman, became an education dealer and started direct selling to schools. Apple paid us $300 per CPU for product placement. That was down from $700 to $1200 for inventory sales but we tried to make up for it in volume. We sold a lot of Apple IIe computers into East Texas schools. Then came the IIc and the IIgs. then the Macintosh. Then the LaserWriter. Of course we carried other computers. We always did. But our bread and butter had a distinct Apple flavor. Then along came Bill. (The other Bill. Not you.) The economy started heating up. Major corporate offices in town closed or moved. Mail order houses started to flourish. (I complained about mail order taking our business every day) Everyone wanted to compare Apples to IBMs, only they were really talking IBM clone. The single size only 9 inch B&W monitor became harder to sell. The only market we had left was the technical professional and the home computer, which by the way was half gone by way of the student purchase program. Apple was still trying to push their IIc & IIgs into the rest of the homes. Technical pros were opting for Intels. I finally left the computer retail business in disgust. Went back to work as an instrument technician. I made more money. But it just wasn't as much fun. Been peckin' on these Mac keyboards ever since. And you know, after all my bellyachin' about mail order, it took me one bad experience with a local dealer and I've been a mail order customer ever since. HerbVic