I got this impression of him over the phone. He was pretty pissed when I bought the sub from Suzanne instead of him, and even more so when Kyle compensated me for my time spent fixing my MFW-15.
And I'll tell you why he was pissed too. Depending who you bought a product from dictated who the commissions went to and what the commisision structure would be. Now you would think that ought not to matter but here's why it did. If you bought through Kyle, he got a percentage of the sale and his percentage depended on what his sales (dollar) volume was. The rest was AV451's and AV451 was Shifty, Shifty-wife, and Shifty-Suzy. 'Course there was AV451 itself and its day to day operation costs.
In the past few months, even longer, I've said AV451 was having finanacial problems. To let you know how bad the problems were, a person who for a short time did business with AV451 was in a meeting with the unholy trinity. Yeah, trinity. And yeah, unholy. In that meeting, which wasn't pleasant,
Shifty-Suzy got pissed and said for all to hear that it was her husband's money that was keeping AV451 afloat and paying the bills. Shifty turned red and looked to trivialize it and moved the discussion in another direction.
It wasn't profits. There really were none to speak of that were large enough to pay for the operation of AV451 - salaries, commissions, lease, heat, taxes, insurance, snow removal, warranty claims, and whatever it takes to keep a business afloat. The reason for that is because the general pricing structure for a product in this industry was 5X cost. It's that (and then some for AV451) for just about everyone making speakers that you can think of. They had to slash prices on the MFW's to get them to move because really, the overall quality was second rate.
So if you bought from Mark, Mark could bypass AV451. If you bought from Shifty-Suzy, she'd get the money and like everyone else that's taken it up the chocolate highway, she wanted to get some payback for what she and her husband had been laying out. Suzy was smelling the coffee. If you bought through the computer (remember all those you can only place your order through the computer?) it went to AV451 and its principals. Kyle never got much. So, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it was because Kyle was the low man on the totem pole and he was the one that was always looked at last, that he was accommodating to you. By doing the right thing, he basically screwed the principals who were looking to assuage customers with phone calls and not replacements.
That's why Shifty was pissed. For those who've doubted me in the past over what I've said, it's all come to pass and then some. What I'm telling you is essentially the way things were working out over there. There was infighting going on and scrambling for 'profits' because even Suzy was getting taken by Step-Dad. Just so
YOU realize how bad this is, the total cost of a sub was in and around $200, so Shifty was pissed off over $200.
Clint, we owe you a debt of gratitude for taking a stand against the shenanigans perpetrated by Mark Schifter. While other audio websites censored, and even banned, discussions about his misconduct, your website kept the heat on him. It would not surprise me if Audioholics served as an important catalyst for the involvement of the authorities. Thank you.
We do owe a debt of gratitude to Clint, Gene, and the entire organization. The content on Audioholics was useful because as long as this thread is, it summarized a lot of information found elsewhere. Believe it or not, we owe an enormous debt to AV451 and their decision to not have deleted the forum posts relating to the raffles. I archived most of those threads and saved the links. Those were passed on to the charities affected and passed on to the authorities if need be. This allowed the whole plan to be examined and allowed determining who gave what and even provided the means to contact people who had saved their receipts. This Audioholics thread was sort of like a central location from which various posts could be examined on other websites for additional information. Had this thread been cut way short, it would've been much more difficult and have taken much longer to nail Shifty. Then even more people would've been hurt.
Yeah.... even my thread has now been deleted. And all I was doing was saying goodbye to some of the "really old" forum members like me.
Sad indeed
I know Quad. From AV451's perspective they've still got stuff to sell. Not much, but they've got stuff.
