Julian,
I am quite familiar with this having worked in industries where they
regularly write off merchandise etc for all kinds of reasons.
But if you go to Browning Arms for instance, or several other manufacturers,
they have lists of parts inventories sold off to various dealers and
businesses - with parts for items made before WW2 on and on back even. They
even have a published list on their own website of the dealers and addresses
to obtain these obsolete parts. And they still sell new guns - regularly
every year. Result? Browning have a very wide and loyal customer base and
their new sales are as good as any other.
Oly-USA could have sold those parts off in one lot in one day. I bet it
would not have taken but a few phone calls and a short meeting and
inspection of the the items piled up in a shipping container on the dock.
The people that generally hold on to such obsolete goods as OM cameras are
hardly going to let themselves be forced into buying any new product. Should
the day come all my OMs get trashed before I do, I will simply look for
another old mechanical camera and lens from someone else. Attempting to
force a customer base for what are in a certain sense of the durable goods
type, by dumping parts, into a disposable consumer market of throwaways is
not likely to work.
Business is business, but I have a higher respect (and patronage) for those
businesses which exercize some moral as well as intellectual elements in
their conduct. Waste like that is not among my list of acceptable practices.
The tax relief from such a write off is hardly going to put a large brick in
their new operation, and it it certainly will not endear any new business
from me. I just hope Olympus Japan and their other major regional facilities
will not do the same type of thing.
I for one will be writing to them to say so.
Cheers,
Lee
----Original Message Follows----
From: "Julian Davies" <julian_davies@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: <olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [OM] Discontinued lenses
Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 22:54:08 +0100
This is an obscene waste. Not a unique example by any means though, and does
not come as a surprize.
It would perhaps be a good idea for as many people as possible to write to
Oly-USA and Japan and beg them not to allow such a thing to happen again.
Cheers,
Lee
Unfortunately, the stock market and the western tax regime make it more than
likely to happen again. My company has just had to do the same thing with
spare parts for machinery we no longer use. On a personal level it pains me.
On a corporate level, sometimes it's all you can do. Of course, our spares
weren't irreplaceable bespoke parts for collectors.
Even disregarding the corporate finance and taxation problem, Oly have to do
this. If they keep the spares, you can get old equipment repaired. If you do
that, you won't be buying as much new equipment as you otherwise would. It's
a reasonable percentage bet that enough people will remember how good the OM
gear was while it lasted, rather than how pissed off they are that they
can't get it fixed, to make this policy a net sales earner. Don't forget
that few (if any) people on this list are current Olympus customers. We all
trade in the aftermarket, from which Olympus earns nothing.
Julian
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