An Open House - Bio part 8

MnJ got an invitation to an open house at Fretz Enterprises, the Pennsylvania RV dealer, my previous home. A lot had been going on with Chinook over the last three years and they decided to take a trip out there to see what was new - a dangerous thing to do! Besides a Concourse, like me at 21 ft long, there was a Destiny at 24 ft, a Glacier at 25 ft with a slide-out (a section of the wall that "slides" out to make the room wider) and a Summit at 27 ft with 2 slide-outs.

Their first stop, because it was right next to where they'd parked, was the Glacier. It was nice but a bit expensive. It did have a fancy paint job like the big guys but the slide-out didn't seem to add enough more space to the room to make it worth the extra cost. And it had a side entry taking up valuable wall space. They said the floor plan seemed uncomfortable even though it was very similar to mine.

There was a Summit, the high-end model, there but it was off limits to viewing. The floating customer service rep said that it had been sold and was being prepared for pick-up. This was no problem because the $200,000 price tag put it completely out of reasonable consideration. Even so it would have been fun to see what it was like inside.

The Destiny, on the other hand, might be workable. It had an extra three feet in length over me and almost all of it went into making the bathroom bigger - a real plus! Across the way the clothes closet was a little bigger and there was added storage in the form of a pull-out pantry with drawers below. But it was equipped with a dinette table and benches rather than the club chairs. And this, they thought, took up too much space and wouldn't be as comfortable a place to relax as club chairs are. The sticker price was a problem but it didn't keep them from thinking.

They were planning a trip to Alaska the next year and the extra storage sure would come in handy. They agreed to talk with a salesman and he, of coarse, put on the hard sell. When he was finished he had promised a very good "open house" discount and even said the dinette could be easily replaced. What he could not do was talk about a trade-in price right then. He said that he wanted "to talk it over with the manager" who was out at the moment.

Since MnJ didn't want to hang around for the manager to come back they arranged to continue the negotiation by email. Long story short, although the discount was very good, the trade-in price was ridiculous! I was insulted. And they wanted $1000 to replace the dinette with the "club lounge"! In the end there was effectively no discount at all and the motor home had been in the lot for several months.

End result:; I survived a potential metamorphosis!