I really hate that the consumer has lost his advantage, if that is what we used to have, pre Covid-19. I loved it back when one could go to Maxwell Ford or whichever car dealership and find hundreds of choices of trucks, or whatever their highest selling vehicles used to be. Nowadays, we are lucky if they even have any representation of the vehicle you might be interested in. I mentioned going to Maxwell Ford and the low volume of cars on the lot. Looking online, they are advertising great deals on their trucks which you can order now and have for the spring, like that is some sort of win. Fuck, we used to complain about going to the dealership, wasting a day there, but at least coming home with a new car.
We drove around today and went to RideNow Powersports, which sells Seadoo products. It used to be Seadoo made personal watercraft (PWC), but now they are also offering pontoons. The pontoons look really cool, but they seem to be made exclusively of plastic. I am curious as to what they look like in person and if they even feel like a quality product. I asked and the sales guy said, "we have two if you want to reserve one." I said no a little frustrated telling him "I want to at least see one and touch it with my hands before deciding if it is something I would even want to buy." The sales guy actually told me he has sold a couple and he still hasn't seen one live, but they should have one to show in a few more weeks.
I guess I should be happy that at least for now they did have a few different PWC sitting all over the showroom floor. Last year we couldn't even find any. They also must have had a couple dozen new ones still sitting in crates, as we could see the big boxes outside, which I take as a good sign.
The last bad thing I noticed was at Bass Pro Shops and their boats. They did have a few boats on the floor, which again, they could not get anything to show a year ago. The thing that caught my eye was the pricing. This store has had the best prices on boats, but what they had seemed more expensive than necessary. A boat I have really liked from Tahoe, with a center console setup was over $50000. The monthly payment, which usually looks good and did, at $338/month stopped looking good when one noticed the months of the contract. They expect the payment to go on for 240 months. That is a solid 20 years, which is a long time to pay that amount. I get the 10–12-year commitment, but I wouldn't want to be stuck with a payment for 20 years, there's a good chance the boat wouldn't even be in service by then.
We may never come back to the days when choices were plentiful, and prices were competitive so it becomes even more doubtful I will be buying a boat or even a large truck. At this point it just seems like a fantasy that we used to own a large truck, the Excursion (new), a boat and an RV. I'm still wondering "what happened?"
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