Re: (idm) 4.95 cds

From Hrvatski
Sent Wed, Jul 14th 1999, 04:58

>I informed them that I was considering contacting the BBB over "bait and
>switch" tactics.

How so? Did they change the price on anything?

>They offer me 20$ off of whatever I want and tell me
>that they "reserve the right" not to supply certain cds in RARE
>instances like mine.

Well, if they can't, they can't.
What can you do?

>Trouble is, from what I've heard via the Ambient &
>IDM lists, *my* situation isn't rare at all, but seemingly their normal
>way of doing biz. I know some of you got freebies, but that's not what
>I'm looking for. They are either using bait and switch tactics on
>purpose or else they are completely clueless in a business sense (the
>excuse they offer is that they "switched distributors and the new one
>cannot supply most of the titles in question". WHY switch to them,
>then?).

I highly doubt they're clueless.
No one really throws away several million dollars w/out a plan
(they're paying at least $11 COST for those CD's yr paying $4.95 for)
We can only assume by now that their plan has succeeded...

They switched distributors (from Valley to God-knows-who...) because Valley
was fulfilling their orders (i.e. supplying the CD's AND shipping them, all
MSN was doing was gathering info...) & found it rather unreasonable to try
& fill the 12+ million orders MSN sent them (during the two weeks of the
offer, no less) any time within the next 6 months... Undoubtedly any other
one-stop is only going to offers titles from the big 5 (majors) and not
anything from Caroline, Koch, Dutch East, Allegro, TVT, etc..., basically
all the stuff any of us would want anyways...

For what it's worth, I've gotten around 30 of the 50 CD's I'd originally
ordered (luckily got wind of this whole deal early on) in about 10 separate
shipments (an initial box of 17 showed up here almost exactly one month
after I'd placed the order, and around 10 others have shown up (one a day)
since then, usually containing one or two CD's each) none of which I've
paid for (yet), with no mis-ships or anything bad. While I feel great about
all of these people buying (or simply getting) CD's from this place and not
Amazon, CD-Now/Music BLVD/etc... (fuckers, all of them), I feel like an
idiot for not buying this stuff from the mom & pop stores that have served
me well for years... -Våt

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