In the US, sir, we work 2,080 hours per year without overtime.

Guapo,

That's fine, so:

* 2500 grand pianos at 3000hrs/piano = 7,500,000 man hours within a year
* 7,500,000/2080 = 3605 people in production!

schwammerl.

The official company profile from the EDGAR listing says



So someone is lying about how many man-hours it takes to make a Steinway (this is their total workforce, including sales, marketing, HR, etc), or every Steinway employee works 80 hour weeks!

Let's assume that 1/4 of these people (don't forget, this is the worldwide figure) actually make pianos in NY. This is probably a very generous estimate.

That's (425 * 2080) / 2500 = 353.6

I'd say the "300 hour" estimate figure is more correct. Someone just added another zero to make it sound better.

What's a little zero among friends?

That's almost an order of magnitude!

Maybe it's not 3000 labor hours.
Perhaps it's 3000 hours from start to finish.
If not, maybe it's bovine excrement.

Hardly. We pay people for 2080 hours, but between vacations (say average 3 weeks), holidays (average about 5?), and not counting sick leave, etc. Most people probably work only 7.5 hour days (8-5 less lunch max).

So call it 48 weeks @ 37.5 = 1800

And that's without even allowing for web browsing, texting and email (only subtracting the personal ones).

Then there's political correctness training, birthday parties, smoke breaks, potty breaks, etc.

And very little work is done on Mondays or Fridays, almost none on the days before or after holidays.

Then there are days with big sporting events, high profile trials, hurricanes or snow or floods (whether nearby or just interesting).

Office betting pools. Girl Scout cookie days.

By my math we're down to about 200 hours of productive work a year.

So if it takes 300 hours, that's 1.5 man years.

So maybe they were just quoting paid labor not work hours?

I thought Steinway was only making about 700 grands this year. What is their actual production? Which means to me how many customers do they have?

For anyone who has traveled much it becomes quickly apparent that Americans (and us Canadians) work WAY more than most Europeans.
In my travels I've made countless friends from various parts of Europe and the vast majority of them get something like 4-5 weeks MINIMUM vacation by law, and most of them think that we work way too much over here.
I tend to agree.

It’s going to be a lot closer to 300 hours. That Baldwin SF-10 would have been finished up in about 200 hours, give or take.

None of these figures say much about the quality of the finished product. If it takes four hours to hand-assemble a skeleton and 20 minutes to do a better job by machine which is the better foundation on which to build a piano?

While visiting one very high-end piano maker I was told—with obvious pride—that it was going to take that worker about six to eight hours to hand-notch a bridge. Any decent million-dollar machine will do the same or better job in ten minutes or so.

Man (or person) hours in production are a meaningless way judge an instruments quality.

ddf

Unless you're self-employed. Then you get to work more.

ddf

You can't discount the "3,000 hours" figure on that site as a typo, because he goes on to say other manufacturers only take 1,500 hours. This makes it an intentional statement.



Let's assume that the minimum plausible "fully loaded" cost for labor (including employer's contribution for payroll tax, benefits, and insurance) is $20/hour. (This means a salary of about $12/hour, low for the skilled laborers trained through a rigorous system.)

That means the labor cost alone for a Steinway Grand, according to this dealer, is $60,000. If labor alone was the only cost to making a piano, Steinway loses money on every S, M, and O it sells! If the shareholders got wind of this, they'd fire all those laborers and replace them with machines!

The Conn-Selmer company, which is owned by Steinway Musical Instruments Company, Steinway Piano's parent company, pays its workers between $15 and $35 an hour, according this article on cleveland.com. (The article is about a strike there, and how Steinway Musical Instruments is hiring scabs, who I'm sure have gone through the rigorous journeyman process, to replace them.)

The original source of the "3,000 hours" figure seems to come from the site " 4tepiano.com, a dealer of restored Steinway pianos, that appears to be unrelated to the Florida dealer

There is a very clear and professional way to disparage some competitors. Please allow me to demonstrate hypothetical recomendations from one piano professional if asked about several teachers for an ambitious new student:
"Teacher A is wonderful, he's a talented, vibrant, and energetic artist and a rising star locally. He can devote a lot of time with students, and is happy to work with modern styles and new music."
"Teacher B has built a solid reputation and many of her students have won competitions over the last 3 decades. She's a great teacher of traditional music and also has used her networking skills to help former students advance through college and establish music careers."
"Teacher C. Hmmm... Well, Teacher C also teaches piano."


It's easy to tell who's good and who isn't. And not a single insulting word has been said.

Oh, come on! Don't be so obvious about pushing Story & Clark.. It says on your web site that "Story and Clark has very good pianos built in China by Heintzmann." You're just trying to disguise a point of emphasis as updated information. I also noticed a mention that QRS, like Steinway, is a company that has found its niche.

By any chance are you selling Story & Clark pianos with the QES Pianomation strip factory-installed?





With all due respect, you're either deaf or just trying to throw a wrench into Chinese piano production with this comment. Essex is as much a private label as Suzuki. Steinway doesn't make Essex, but only Steinway sells it. Costco doesn't make Suzuki. It's made wherever Suzuki happens to be shopping its contracts this month. I don't think Costco is even selling private label acoustic pianos at this time. You might be sending people on a fool's errand. Actually, you'd be doing that even if I'm wrong and Costco has some in stock.

I think it would be much better advice to recommend Essex. Steinway's piano DNA in every Essex is superior to Costco's piano DMA in every Suzuki. It's a fact!



Thrill,

I don't think Greg is saying things about the competition here. He's just sorting through the also-rans. Steinway acknowledges no one as a competitor. That's how it plays the game. I don't think you'll get much of a rise out of outraged Steinway competitor dealers here either because they also know how the game is played -- more like Australian rules football than the gentleman's lawn bowling tournament that many members here feel would be more appropriate.

With 40 years in piano retail, I'm sure that Greg is pretty flexible on all this stuff. If he had to go back to selling Bösendorfer, he could come up with something better than "Buy a Bosie. It's obscure and overpriced."

William,

Are you here saying with that you do not believe in the 'designed by Steinway' story or at least you do not believe the Essexes contain significant Steinway design elements?

My definition of a stencil has always been: a simple rebadge of an existing product fromanother manufacturer. As soon as important design elements are changed/added or the design is new but production is outsourced to an OEM, I do no longer define it a stencil.

However I must admit that personally I found it at least always very strange that some years ago Steiwnay could step over so swiftly for the production from YC to PR, adding in one stroke a bunch of new upright and grand models! They either must have at Steinway quite a bunch of designers or these designers must be extremely productive!



But Steinway does include benchark data in their corporate reports. With this I do not say that what they wright is correct - on the contrary - it looks more like a viewpoint from a self-satisfied manufacturer. However continuously underestimating your competitors on the longer term can be dangerous [ see e.g. page 8 of the link below]

Steinway Musical Instruments, Inc. Management Presentaion 2011

schwammerl.

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics: in 2010 the average number of hours worked per employee in the US is just under 1800. Very few nations' workers work more hours annually. Workers in most European countries work substantially less. The number in the US is quite a bit higher for full time people (subtracting out part time labor). I could find the exact number if I looked, but, I think the average annual hours worked per full time worker is in the neighborhood of 2200 hours.

The notion that a Steinway piano takes 3,000 labor hours is so dang funny. Really, you have to laugh. Anyone who wrote that bit of nonsense into his website .... well, careless would be too polite a term. That's bad arithmetic of a colossal order. I would imagine that average compensation costs at Steinway easily top $35 per hour (salary, benefits, FICA). On the other hand, when your interest is furthered by NOT knowing the facts .... you put silly stuff in public view.

No, I don't question the Steinway design elements in Essex pianos, but Essex is a private label piano. Steinway doesn't build it, but it is the exclusive seller.

IMO Essex is representative of better Chinese pianos, but there is a Steinway price premium attached to an Essex. One way (not the only way) for a retailer to confront a shopper who is concerned about that premium is to suggest that the customer is more concerned about price than value. Greg's suggestion that those whose main concern is price should buy a Costco/Suzuki is intended to embarrass that shopper so that he will step up and pay more for Steinway 'value'. There's nothing novel about that approach, and I assume Greg has found that it works wit his usual customer base, but I don't think it's good form for a professional retailer to advise any shopper to go buy a Costco/Suzuki. For the same money a shopper can get a better piano. Greg can play dealer mind games without stopping that far.

My point is that Greg's comments on any other piano brands should not be taken all that seriously. He is not sizing up the competition. He's just sneering at it by putting his own bag of dirty tricks into print. His local competition can take that as a cue to do likewise.

Personally, I can't even relate to his comment that what separates genuine Steinway pianos from those he characterizes as second-rate is the dynamic range. There is no shortage of dynamic range in most European brands. The range of tonal colors that a Steinway can extract from its dynamic range is a much better selling point.

I don't want to get sucked into this thread because, as Sophial pointed out, the discussion here is not about Steinway. It's about one retailer trying to sell his pianos into his local market. The commentary on his web site would in no way prevent me from visiting his establishment or even being his customer. His pianos would be the determinant, not his obviously distorted map of the market.

in the 3000 hour figure he must be counting the hours it takes for the wood to age



just in case there is some confusion, my original post wrt "quantity is not synonymous with quality" was a reply to the dealer's post implying that high quantity was related to high quality. stating the obvious didn't seem necessary, assuming this to be an audience capable of perceiving the implication without becoming pedantic.

regarding the lenin quote -- if, in the context of war (or any aggressive behavior for that matter) there is a quality to quantity, i defined it as decisive/overwhelming force, as put forth from sun tzu thru the powell doctrine; any force seeking to conquer via overwhelming odds. a case can be made that steinway has been successful deploying this strategy to maintain its stranglehold on concert halls, schools and artists.

For sure it is about one specific dealer, still it surprises me that Steinway NY allows this to happen knowing it is assumed they normally keep a strict control over dealers: pricing discipline, prep obligations (?)..

In Europe all official Steinway dealer use the same web lay-out, presumably imposed by Steinway Hamburg.

schwammerl.

This seems silly, especially if the content is also that rigorously centralized. That kind of top down control may avoid little problems like a rogue dealer spouting nonsense (as his opinion, of course) that hurts the brand name, but it also throws away every dealer's local knowledge of his/her own market. There are sensible intermediate approaches between one-size-fits-all and complete dealer freedom.

absolutely.. most people are quick to notice negativity.. i hope at least. Steinways should not need to be built up in this way.. they are indeed fine pianos. I visit our dealership in town and invariably they have a new guy who pounces upon me (not literally) and gives me the rundown. Sometimes however, i get a really nice dealer with some time and he points out the wondrous octave in the rebuilt M.. or something else equally intriguing. They have a wonderful showroom.

This is an endless conversation. Even if the dealer simply states to the customer that his product is the best and then the customer comes to you and asks you, "Is it true that the other dealer is the best?" You will be forced to say that he is not. Of if you say that he is, you will be loosing a potential sale.

The only time when "bad mouthing" between dealers is going to stop, is when all the pianos are going to be standardized to be made the same. More than it, if all pianos are going to be the same, there will be no dealers. Everyone will be buying a piano online, or will not need anyone to explain why their product is better.

My opinion,

Educating and bad mouthing are not the same thing. Many times I have told someone that the piano they are considering elsewhere is comparable to what they are seeing at our place and if they bought that piano they would be happy.

Sometimes those people buy those pianos.

Other times I am able to direct them to a piano that I can show in concrete terms is a finer quality instrument. Sometimes those people buy our offering instead.

This is doing what is best for my customer. Full Disclosure - we are an unusual operation. We may have twenty or so brands on the showroom floor at any given time, and therefore more chance to have a competitive offering. But I know stores that carry only two lines that do the same thing.

Bottom Line - Owners and managers set the tone for how a particular business functions in every element of operations, including how they train their people to sell.

Badmouthing is the result of a deliberate decision.

I think there are plenty of answers between those two.

This is a question you pose to someone you trust.
. . . "Is it true that the other dealer is the best?"
I'd avoid asking any question of someone whose answer will be suspect.

This a loaded, and really unfair question to ask anyone IMO.

A question like this seems evident that they really don't trust that person, and are only trying to put them in a corner. Better to do your own homework, because you probably won't get a straight answer, even from an honest person. When I'm asked something like this, my reply is simply "I try to do my best."

Taking the time to do your own research is still the best way. Too few people do these days, and end up blaming everyone else when things go wrong.

Would you mind giving us few examples of possible answers?

I'd say...

"They are fine people at the other dealer but our goal is delighted customers."

It's a "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" question.

"At this dealership we tell customers what's good about the pianos we sell. We don't feel bad mouthing the competition is appropriate."