awap:
I believe the quality of LDS customer and technical service would improve if the restrictions on competition were relaxed. I'm somewhat surprised that you are allowed to accept mail-order tech service work.
Most of the mail in service work is pretty hard to critisize though when it's a rural location with 300-500 miles between dive shops.
The small amount of Scubaboard generated service work (a few per year) always worries me though because it happens for one or more of the following reasons:
1. There is no dealer for that brand near where they live
2. They have gotten poor service from their LDS
3. Their LDS charges outrageous amounts for an annual service
4. Their LDS discourages annual services on older regulators in order to sell them a new reg,
5. Their LDS refuses to service a reg they bought used or off e-bay,
6. Or their LDS does not know how to do a decent job servicing and adjusting specialized designs like the a D300, D350 or D400.
Customers have to be pretty highly motivated by poor customer service locally to send a reg away for service as they end up spending about $30.00 total to ship them back and forth.
To refuse to do mail service after they present a good reason why they want to send the reg elsewhere would be poor customer service on my part. But none the less, every time I get a request to do this, I worry that some disgruntled and angry shop owner who provides poor service is going to blame the LDS I work with for the lost business and complain to his/her sales rep rather than regard it as a customer service problem in his/her shop and address it appropriately.
Personally, I think dive equipment companies with pricing policies should allow dealers more lattitude in discounting below the MSRP, especially on their higher end regulators where the margin is usually already generous and where shops could still be profitable with a larger discount. Allowing dealers higher discounts would give them a more effective tool to compete with and combat on-line retailers.
I still highly doubt Scubapro is going to allow authorized on-line sales as doing so would do serious damage to their dealer network even if they made major changes to allow local dealers to engage in on-line, mail order and internet sales with much deeper discounts than are now allowed.
I think there is a greater chance that Larry is just in the process of ending a Scubapro dealership and is liquidating stock.