Do you think that you were ripped off?

[nyonyo]

I was just in the market for a new piano and finally purchased a new piano.
This is the first time, I dealt with piano salesman by myself. In the past, my parents did the negotiation and I knew nothing about this.

The last four weeks had been an eye opening experience. I found the final price is about 50% of the original price tag attached to each piano that I saw. By the way, this is for Yamaha pianos. Let's use two examples: Yamaha C3 MSRP is $45K, after talking several minutes with the salesman, the price was dropped to $24K. The one that I bought was YUS1, its price tag was $12K and I bought for $7K. Out of curiosity, I checked the Yamaha Japanese's website, YUS1 MSRP is $6.5K. Here is the website:

https://yamaha.jp/product/keyboards/uprightpianos/

I am not sure whether people can still bargain in Japan.   By the way, I was offered 4 different prices for YUS1 by 3 different salesmen, the first salesman offered me at $9K, the second at $8K, the third at $7.6K and finally the second saleman forgot the original price that he offered me and then gave me another $1K discount so that the final price is $7K. We can tell that they just pull their offering prices from out of the blue wishing that we will buy whatever price that he quote. Especially, when we look at the MSRP of $12K, who will not be happy to get $3K discount?

You can imagine if I were in a hurry, I would have paid $2K too much. To be honest, I think even the 7K is still kind of high for a YUS1. Since it is a brand new model, I have no way to find the reasonable price. The regular U1 is offered at $6K. However, once you tried the YUS1, you do not really want to play on U1 anymore. YUS1 really has different sound from that of U1. I think for 1K more, I'd better get a YUS1. In addition, I know I will get a brand new piano. With U1, we have to be careful, many of those pianos are actually a program piano, which means that those pianos were lent to some institutions and a year later they retrieved the pianos back and then sold to us. They still look good, but they should not misrepresent the piano as a brand new piano.

I think the chance of getting ripped off buying high end piano must be substantially higher than buying a generic  piano like Yamaha or Kawai.

Do you think you had been ripped off?

[thalberg]

I was very much ripped off when I bought my Yamaha grand.  They sent me a piano from the warehouse, not the one off the floor that I had picked out.

Also, I shopped for a Mason and Hamlin and the salesman immediately dropped the price from 60K to 36K.  (It was a BB)  Not kidding!!

However, the bass section sucked so I didn't buy it, and he said other customers passed over that piano for the same reason....so he had some motive for dropping the price.