CajunTim
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Sorry for the drama guys, if you only knew the behind the scenes just from 1 or 2 on this site alone
Anyways we are in a holding pattern now and we may have to pony up another $6-8 per but hopefully not. The decision is supposedly going to me made Sunday as to whether or not the price is increased. I say go for the price increase it will put me out at least another $80. I dont even know what I have invested into them at this point as I have been refunding peoples PayPal fees, overnight postage fees for those who opted out, so that no one is upset.
10 CajunTim's Co-workers
2 Splash
2 swagge1
4 wb5qbk
3 edman87k5
2 TheWho
4 Skywlkr
2 Quas
2 Nick
1 CalvaryJim
1 GeauxBubba
2 Leo1109
1 McMedic
4 PearlsLSU
3 Rahllin
3 Bullet
2 VM2
2 TSO
1 lost
1 nonmember
58 Total
If you feel something is wrong with the above please let me know via PM.
Sorry for the drama guys, if you only knew the behind the scenes just from 1 or 2 on this site alone
Anyways we are in a holding pattern now and we may have to pony up another $6-8 per but hopefully not. The decision is supposedly going to me made Sunday as to whether or not the price is increased. I say go for the price increase it will put me out at least another $80. I dont even know what I have invested into them at this point as I have been refunding peoples PayPal fees, overnight postage fees for those who opted out, so that no one is upset.
Here is a response from J&T/DSC on AR15.com as they are an Industry Partner over there.
http://www.ar15.com/forums/topic.html?b=2&f=40&t=168824I will approach this on a couple of different fronts.
I'll post essentially the same thing that I told Chris last night.
Things have been ridiculously crazy since the week before the election, and they are crazier since SHOT.
General:
First off, there are a couple of vendors that make my lowers. The prices are based on the primary supplier. My primary supplier has not been able to increase production to meet our increased demand to date, however my secondary vendor continues to do as promised and ups his production capacity to accommodate our increased sales, and had became our primary supplier for lowers. This vendor has been shipping more lowers per week that my other vendor is supplying me in a month. The lowers are made to the same specs, have the same quality as my other vendor, and we have been using this company since the beginning. The downside to this vendor is that they are more expensive by $8. Economics dictate that there has to be a price increase by the amount of the cost increase.
Our Business Practices:
I love how someone always knows "someone in the industry" and they know exactly what goes on in my shop and all of my business practices from both ends and that I'm always out to screw everyone. If there is a decent sized shop out there that can make the correct product for a fair price, I have probably already talked to them. No one has extra capacity that I have found that supplies lower receivers of equal quality or better than my two suppliers. If I had found them I would have them under contract already. If I had 100k lowers on the shop floor right now, I doubt that I would have to make more than 5 phone calls to sell them, the same thing goes with guns.
At this point in time I have orders for everything that I could possibly build for the rest of the year. I had several big distributors offer to write me ridiculous P.O.'s and prepay to get them bumped up to the front of the line. I did not accept anything, and we are still conducting business in the same fashion that we always have. I do have several good P.O.'s from several distributors, but everyone is in line based on order date.
Legal:
In our catalogs and on our websites they all state that prices are subject to change. That doesn’t mean that if an order is in that price is set in stone. We typically absorb price increases when possible, but when they exceed that threshold, we have to pass it on.
Lower Supply:
When lowers come in a percentage of them go for stripped lower orders, and the balance go for rifle builds. We have orders for a few thousand lowers on order in front of this group buy that will be filled prior to shipment. There are many thousand after it as well. Based on the current supply schedule if your group wants to wait on the first supplier at the original price, you will have to wait in line for those lowers to show up. I have others waiting in line for those lowers as well. As I told Chris, at the current rate of lowers arriving from that shop I am guessing around 6 months to be caught up to be able to start shipping from that vendor. It may be sooner, but in today’s climate I offer the most realistic guestimate that I can.
If the current lowers are OK’ed to ship, we should start sending a partial roughly within the next 4-6 weeks. This is not a guarantee, this is my current guestimation based on production schedules that were given to me at SHOT.
Money:
Both of our company policy for payments for orders is that we do not charge until the day it is ready to be packaged, unless we are doing something special that would be a hard sell (such as company specific logo's, odd barrel configuration, etc.). I just went back and talked to Lisa and we did not request a prepayment for this order, $100,000.00 was offered and sent since this was such a large order, the cashier's check arrived last week while I was at SHOT. I do not like having anyone's money for products that we do not have ready to ship. This causes hard feelings, as obviously many feel I'm holding your money and lowers ransom while I get rich off of the interest prior to shipment. This is not the case.
I am more than willing to cut a check for the $100k to send back to Chris once the cashier’s check clears my bank and those funds are available to refund. This is the reason why I don’t like for payment to come before product is ready to ship. I have offered a refund, and I have offered to get the original priced lowers to you when they become available. I will not give you the more expensive lowers for the old price. There is nothing further that I can offer. You can talk amongst yourselves and make your decision and let Chris know and he can deal with me, as that is who has the order in for me. As for anyone else that wants to call in and inquire, we will not be answering any further questions on this.
Closing:
When we started this conversation with Chris in August (I believe), we were originally looking at a few hundred lowers. November 1, we had the original 3% price increase go into effect that covered the additional operating expenses, which was prior to the order being placed. This whole deal was originally done kind of as a favor to Chris, Brian, and Dianne, as I have known Chris’s parents for many years. I had several industry friends that advised against doing the group buy, as they never go smoothly and usually cause bad feelings. At the time of discussion, supply was not a problem, and I had 6k+ lowers on the shelf and more arriving on a regular basis, and we were not looking at any large numbers. After the election, things went nuts and all that had been surplus supply turned into tremendous backlog. We have been trying to accommodate everyone in a timely fashion (not compared to August, but compared to current industry standards) in the order that their order was placed. I know that I am not going to make everyone happy, and if I gave the lowers to everyone for free, someone would be upset that I didn’t include a $100 bill for their time and trouble, and if I did that, it should have been $1000
I have laid the facts out on the table and hopefully everyone can see where we are at. We will not be commenting any further on this matter. All communication should go through Chris.
Thanks,
Jesse
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