sety wrote: Tue Oct 16, 2018 11:20 am
Did you hear the part where Bradley was talking about his plan to work until he drops dead? That was the perfect time to ask about succession planning but the interviewer didn't do it! I was horrified!
I started a thread on just that couple years ago elsewhere I think.. Is basically saying if the guy drops dead tomorrow, was going to happen to all the stuff, landfill ?
From what people tell me you have met him in person, they'll say he looks knackered. Apparently what I remember he refuses to employ anyone to help him out as he thinks they will start pinching stuff.
He claims to have loads of stuff untouched and unopened, if this is true,he is never going to get time get around to sorting the stuff out. Surely if you employed someone even if it costs in money for that person, he would double the stock and packages you can send out surely that would be a good thing... Oh well..
I remember way back when myself and Alison designed PeST, we approached Brad to be a distributor USA for the market, of course he got awards for best Atari support etc etc, and obviously sells a lot of Atari items so it made sense. But the price he offered was basically a insult. I remember he offered $3 for a item which was selling for about $25 or more at the time. We could not even buy the chip for that that alone recover the money invested in all the equipment, the cables, assembly times and costs etc etc. Basically was take it or leave it. Considering the amount of PeST sold over the years overseas, simply has not helped the community at all as every single person had to buy from the UK. So basically his support was zero.
Because shipping overseas is expensive, would have made sense for him to have a stock of these locally to USA people. It would make some money by just basically shipping stuff out and the community would get items cheaper rather than us shipping them from UK all the time.
His prices are pretty high as well. Granted if he only has limited stock it would make sense for the prices to be high on items, but we don't know how many items he has things. I wanted to buy loads of stuff from my web store in bulk. But he does not give bulk discounts, and even when I tried to obtain some switches from him a couple years ago, we was exchanging a lot of emails, when it came time to pay, he said he only had 1 switch and would try and look for some for me, which I doubt he ever did. My experiences with him simply never been good ones.
Credit to the guy for selling the stuff he does, but he just seems to be a businessman interested in maximum profits more than anything to me. He also does not like people reselling his stuff on eBay, says so on his site. I understand that to a point. But also as he has something like a $50 minimum order plus postage ? ,
If someone only wanted a small part, what are they going to do ?! Someone like me prepared to take on some stock and resell it in EU , so people can get small quantities of stuff, with cheaper postage, makes sense to me. Sure people have to make a little profit to make it worthwhile doing that. Even if I did manage to buy a lot of stuff from in his listed price, by the time I had paid postage and import fees etc my price would end up being double his to break even with the costs. He doesn't ever seem to want to sell in bulk, he does not give discounts. So he's just made it impossible to happen.
But the thing is, I could have brought a fair bit of stock from him for my web store, he would only be dealing with one person and reselling a lot of stuff .. For a business point of view this makes sense to me. But not to him. I think he simply does not like people reselling his stuff for any sort of profit. Probably also why he refuses to offer bulk discount as well. But of course this would help myself out generating profits my work, the community would get stuff they want cheaper more locally from my store, and even like the STF project where we could really do with connectors and such, just not viable to buy them from him at $5-$10 a pop.
So yes he is selling stuff for the community, plus point, but have to think is only interested in profits. My experiences with him have simply being bad from start to end. So I really just don't like the guy. He could support the community a lot more than he's doing, but he just doesn't. I am probably the only one in the world disliking the guy, of course with very good reasons to.
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