After I wrote my original review, I softened it to give the store the benefit of a doubt. I had already expressed my concerns over their high-pressure sales tactics in text to their manager and hoped they would take the feedback to provide more honest sales service in the future .
Unfortunately, instead of coming clean, the owner has doubled down on the same exaggeration and tactics in his response to my review. Since he's now even gone as far as misrepresenting our behavior (personal attacks), I'm going to directly discuss details and pricing, which I previously withheld out of good faith.
1. Models Tried
We didn't try 10 different models. We tried 5 and we only tried 5 because their salesman insisted we try their lower end chairs first. We came to try the Panasonic MAN-1 and any competing high-end equivalents. Instead we got about 5 minutes on a top-end D. Core before being switched to a couple of low-end chairs for an hour. We didn't get to try the MAN-1 until the very end, and were also asked to try out the previous top of the line MAK-1 first . Can you imagine this behavior in any high-end business? Want to test-drive the newest Porsche? First you must try Kias and last year's Porsche for an hour, and also when you don't like the service, the owner comes back and accuses you of testing too many cars, and implies that YOU were wasting their time?
2. High-Pressure Sales
In texts with the owner after, I emphasized at least 3-5 times, it was not about pricing, but about high-pressure sales tactic styles they employed, as well as the classic use of just relying on consumers not having done any basic research, which allows them to gouge customers and feed them misinformation. Maybe, he calls that a pricing conflict, but I found that deceptive and predatory. Read on, and see my earlier review for additional details on these
3. Misrepresenting a China cloned chair
One of the chairs we liked was a normal looking chair that doubles as a massage chair. Their salesman claimed it was high-end massage chair at $4k, and that they had almost no flexibility on it, because it was a low-margin luxury/high quality chair. Some simple research showed the original design was from Korea and they were just selling a China/Alibaba copy that is $700 on Alibaba.
Even more outrageous, the companies that actually designed the chair sell it in the US too. Nohaus sells it at $1.3k on Amazon, and has an upgraded one at $2k. Once we found the Nohaus chair their salesperson insisted their chair was the equivalent of the upgraded Nohaus chair (even though it's an exact visual copy of the lower-end model), and also insisted that $2-3k was an incredible price for it.
So sure pricing was involved here, but the main problem is pretending that your knockoff chair is the same quality as the original, and having the gall to even justify it being 2-3x the price of the original
4. Panasonic Chairs
Their manager uses USA distribution costs as their main defense for why Canada, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan start the MAN-1 at almost half the price they do ($13k online price versus $6.5k online price). They went as low as $11k and made a big deal about it being a huge discount
Sure there's extra distribution cost, but having cost that's nearly twice the rest of the world, is not so believable. We even got US price quotes for the previous top of the line chair, the MAK-1. FFL starts it online at $12.5.k, but we got quotes for it at $9k with full warranties. These were much smaller stores that weren't big chains, and don't have nearly the distribution efficiency as FFL, but clearly had no trouble making these offers.
So it's clear that the "distribution cost," like all the other claims were just exaggerations and fiction. read more