Originally Posted by
mrdux
Years ago I was in the market for a new Skeeter Starfire bass boat. I found what I was looking for at a dealer several miles from home but it had a Mercury motor installed. The Yamaha motors had just hit the market and I was very interested in buying one. The dealer who had the Skeeter was also a Yamaha dealer so he shot me a price for the rig with the Yamaha. There was a Yamaha dealer 2 miles from my house that I had never been able to buy a boat from but bought my oil and accessories from. I went to my local dealer and explained the situation and asked if he could give me his best price on the Yamaha. He really just blew me off since I wasn't going to be buying the whole rig from him. His cash, out the door price, on the Yamaha was $900 higher than the Skeeter dealer. This was the mid 80s so $900 was a big deal. I tried every way to deal with him but he wouldn't budge. I bought the motor from the Skeeter dealer.
Fast forward 2 years; I get a warranty recall notice on some minor issue with the Yamaha. I tried to contact the dealer where I bought the Skeeter and he was no longer in business--phone disconnected. CRAP!!!
I drove down to the local Yamaha dealer with the notice. I went to the service dept and was sent to the main office to the guy I had tried to buy the motor from before. He looked at the notice and literally threw in back in my face. He told me to get my so-and-so notice out of there, he would never touch my motor, warranty or not. I asked him then and there "Are you a certified Yamaha dealer?" He said he was. I then told him I was going home, getting on the phone with Yamaha, and reporting him as refusing to do my warranty work. I did exactly that.
After a long conversation with a couple of Yamaha factory people, and explaining the situation of the dealer I bought it from no longer being in business, I was told to take my boat to the local dealer where THEY WOULD do my warranty work. I hooked to the rig and trailered it the 2 miles to the dealer. He met me at the door WITH HIS HEAD ABOUT TO EXPLODE!! I was instructed to take the boat to the service department and park it in a certain spot. This boat had never been wet except when I was in it fishing. It had never been stored outside. Here it sat, open to the elements. It sat in that very spot for almost a month until they FINALLY got around to working on it.
When I picked it up, it was so dirty you could hardly tell what color it was supposed to be. It was covered in bird droppings. I went into the service dept and signed the papers to pick it up, they all got a good laugh out of it. Needless to say, I never did any kind of business with them again and they were out of business a short time later. Needless to say, this was the way the guy did business and everyone was shocked he had not had an anchor tied around his neck and been dropped off a bridge. good riddance to his type.