Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Wholesale price for piano dealer?

OK, I am throwing a stone to the peaceful water......

I found this old post from 2/2005, which said "the wholesale price is 50% of the listing price from Piano Buy book..."

Quote:

"New Piano Pricing -- The wholesale price of a new piano is approximately half of the list price in annual supplement to The Piano Book. While I'm sure that this is not absolutely true, I've had it confirmed by several sources. The industry average markup is 75%. A 67% markup over wholesale is a reasonable deal for a new piano, 43% is a good deal, and 25% is a great deal. Dealers cannot stay in business at a 25% markup, so this will only happen under special cases, such as going out of business sales. Dealers tend to take higher markups on higher priced pianos. I don't know why. Maybe someone out there can explain it.

I'll use today's question about the Kemble Empire as an example. The list price in the annual supplement is $10,240. Dividing by 2 gives a wholesale price of $5,120. Adding 67% markup gives a reasonable price of $8,550, a good price of $7,332, and a great price of $6,400. This makes her price of $6,300 an amazing deal!"

Link: https://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubb...6/topic/000038/Number/0/site_id/1#import

My questions:

(1) Is it true today?

(2) If it is true, then is the wholesale price today 50% of MSRP or SMP?

(3) If it is true, can we just add 20-30% above it to buy a new one?

As I just said on another thread, the wholesale price of a new piano is only one component of what it actually costs the dealer to buy it and keep it on his or her sales floor. There are debt service, salaries to employees, building maintenance, utility bills, etc. Once all the expenses attributable to the individual piano plus all the overhead are accounted for, the dealer still has to eat! The dealer does not get to pocket the difference between the wholesale price and what the buyer pays for the piano. . . .

We'll said and reasonable, rank piano amateur.

Maybe half or some other percentage the SMP. Of course, there are other factors so any percent would be an average cost. The list price is utterly irrelevant in terms of what the dealer pays and should be irrelevant in terms of what a buyer pays.

That's the whole point of having the SMP. If you read Fine's explanation of SMP everything will be clear.

The quote from 2005 is wrong.