I would love to hear if it has been anyone else’s experience that when it comes to price negotiation with vendors and the church people in sales are just as deceitful and sometimes even more with the church. I can’t tell you how many times that a new vendor has tried to gouge the church on pricing. It seems that when they find out we are a church they see this mirage of a sucker form in place of my head and they jack up the price. When called on it, almost every time they say it was some type of clerical error or something to that affect.
Has the fear of God completely escaped our culture? My conscience, Christian or not, would never allow me to take advantage of a church this way. Just the fear of the wrath of God from trying to take advantage or manipulate a church for my gain would make my knees shake.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not opposed to paying top dollar for good technology if it is something we need. And I of course want the company to be successful and to be able to make a profit. Just don’t flippin’ come in here with sucker on your mind and treat the deal differently just for the fact that we are a church.
Man I need some chapstick, my lips hurt real bad!
4 comments:
I've only had a few such instances...vendor either misses or purposely "forgets" to give us charity licensing, charges us sales tax, or some such.
I've lucked out though as we have 2 members that work at CDW and Ingram-Micro...and they do everything possible to get us the best pricing.
My best experience with a vendor happened just last week. We're getting pricing on a Sonicwall 3060 and in addition to getting quotes from my usual vendors, Ed called sonicwall directly. The rep was awesome and got permission to give us government tier pricing.
I'm with you though...if I were a salesperson I'd be scared to death to try and do a shady deal with a church! Just goes to show how desensitized today's culture is I suppose.
Sounds like you have done a great job aligining yourselves with people and vendors that are looking out for you. I pray that God will send us some people to do the same.
Yeah, those vendors will take you to the cleaners :-)
Get it? "Clerical error?" Eh? Eh?
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