Changing of Dell...

Dell announced that it is quitting its Twin Falls Call Center that Pam has worked at for over 5 years. I guess they don't want any support service that speaks English anymore. That will mean about 500 people will be out of work between now and the end of the year.

Pam was off of work for the past two days with a horrible cold and missed all the trauma and drama that happened after the announcement. It said in the paper that any Dell employee that spoke to any news source about the closure would not get any severance pay. I wonder what the severance package will be?

Also, Aaron, my oldest son, called me a couple of days ago from Kalifornia and said he had been laid off from his job. So, I guess the newly fixed economy isn't as fixed as is reported by the unbiased media...

On the business front, sales have slowed down lately, but we continue to add new dealers. As soon as the economy gets better again, it should go crazy. We are working on the new product, our serving jig. The first prototype Aminder sent had some issues, but I was able to get some expert help from Charlie, a member of my pool team, to do the work on he stainless steel parts and I tracked down a new base for it from a 1" thick custom plastic cutting board.

It should be a great little tool. We are going to use it for the DVD taping for the Shimano Deal. After that, we will use the data we learn from it to build the final product that we will sell to all of our distribution network towards year end.

We have given up on trying to sell any products that we don't manufacturer. There just isn't enough margin in any products to distribute them and have any profit left in them. The Internet has cut the 'standard' margins as so many dealers can go directly to the mfgr to get their products instead of having to go through the second level distributor. And, even then, most of the mfgrs have cut the dealer discounts removing their products from even most dealers that require the 'old' margin. But, the same Internet as created a new class of dealers that can deal with the lower margins as they don't even stock the products in many cases. they just get an order from a customer and have the mfgr drop ship the product directly to the customer. So, to these new dealers, making 20 to 30% is fine with them. So, those price margins don't even offer enough discount to meet our channel discounts so we would loose money on them as well as having to keep them stocked and have all the new boxes and various other things that go along with them.

If the new jig goes well, we willl actively look at other market opportunities that need someone to provide a solution.

Well, that is about all that is happening in DaHo today...