Andrew Fildes wrote:
> That would be because Nikon had the D40 and 40x out and the D200 was
> a great bod. Meanwhile Canon's 400D and 30D are getting long in the
> tooth. The stores are pushing Nikon and Pentax to the wide-eyed first
> dSLR market at present 'cos the counter staff are just like the rest
> of us - they love new and shiny things.
>
Have things changed that much? It used to be that the counter staff
pushed whatever had the best "spiff" and/or whatever the boss told them
to push. And the boss told them to push whatever he just got a deal on,
so his profit margin was higher than usual - and he had a lot of them -
and/or whatever was clogging up the inventory and needed to leave - soon.
I'd imagine that the need to clear inventory that hasn't moved fast
enough is a bigger factor than in days gone by, when model life was
measured in years, not weeks.
Spiff was the term for the amount of money provided to the salesman by
the manufacturer for each specific unit sold. And it probably had the
same sort of roots as those that generated the boss's pushes. Sell them
a Flab-o-flex 2000 instead of a Goldschmutz 2100 and you just got a free
lunch. Talk him up to the 3500 model with accessories, and you just
bought yourself and the wife a nice dinner.
A couple of weeks later, you are pushing the other camera, cause the
spiffs have changed.
The one exception was products that failed and came back at too high a
rate. I knew one camera store sales person years later who was still up
in arms about the Oly AF SLRs if one made the mistake of mentioning them.
Moose
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