not so much. at the shop i used to work at, we had every single metra piece in stock. as a matter of fact, we used to get employees from best buy and circuit city in all the time getting dash kits that they didn't have in stock to do an install
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When you work at a shop like best buy or circuit city, such a small percentage of their profit comes from car audio sales/installs it would be impracticle for them to stock every single part available. If ALL of your sales are coming from it, you cant afford to walk customers or tell them to get a kit from another store. cc and bb could honestly do away with car audio all together and come out ahead in most locations. Its a completely different business when your comparing a small audio shop to a big box retailer that makes most of its profit from computer and television sales. Trust me it would make my life alot easier if I had everything in stock at all times, but its not the way it works. Call corporate and tell them, the individual stores have little control over their inventory.
trust me we had it all, even the ones you mentioned. granted we only had one of each of the rarely used ones but we were never "out" of something, unless it was on backorder from metra. and as far as the kit for the chevy's, if we didn't have a particular color in stock, we would use SEM color matched paint on them (great stuff) provided it was ok with the customer. i remember when we moved all our kits from the room we had them in to the garage, dude, that took like three days to get everything in order.oh, we even had those ones for the newer accords, where the a/c controls are part of the kit. i know those are pretty uncommon
Tell the cops you bought a dash kit at best buy and circuit city wont give you a refund???????? Hmmm for some reason i wouldnt feel threatend in a legal sense.
Actually a VERY LARGE portion of CC's profit is made off of the Roadshop. And now with the new in home PC service, in home theatre install, in store PC....services are becoming a very LARGE part of the CC business model.
In big cities, maybe. You have to remember that not everywhere has the market for it. And with the costs to run a shop(insurance, tools, installers), alot of roadshops dont really make much of an impact on budgets. For example, on a typical day our roadshops budget might be $2500 for the day when the whole stores budget is over $50000, a big part coming from tv, computer, and dvd/merch sales. It might be a little higher in your area, depending obviously where you are located. Point is, even if we crush our budget and end up with $5000 in volume(which very rarely happnes) that still only makes up around 10% of the stores total volume. And some of those people will be purchasing items that the roadshop wont install(portable gps being a big part of this). Its hard to compare pc installs to car installs just because so many more people are using some form of pc vs. having equipment installed in their car. This might be incorrect but to the majority of the middle age crowd, more of them will need something installed on their new computer rather than their new vehicle. To a big part of the population it is impracticle to rip out the "awesome" sounding bose system in their Trailblazer to replace it with aftermarket equipment. This is why pc services have taken off so good, because alot of times you HAVE to have software installed on a computer to make it work the way you want to. In my area, if you took gps out of the picture total revenue is hardly effected by car audio. Maybe(hopefully) now that the roadshop is "firedog car" this will take a positive turn, but im just stating what I have seen in the years I have worked there. Circuit city has actually always offered in home theatre install (and i believe pc install too) , but it was done through a 3rd party company that none of the associated knew much about and therefor it was never offered. Firedog is just pure advertising and thats why its becoming so big.
Alllllright: correction: SOME do. Here, I haven't gotten screwed or ripped off yet...prob because I know quite a bit to know bettter. Better yet, I hardly go there to buy anything car audio related. However, as someone mentioned earlier, and you as well, he's the one that shoulda returned the boughtened product at the other store, its not CC's responsibility to return other stores' goods. And woulda walked right out. OR just special order the darn kit and be over with. Sounded like someone was too much in a hurry gotta have it now thing.
