Mid Size Power Boats

Quality Issues

The idea of always shopping for the lowest price may be without risks for many other kinds of products, but it is very risky when applied to boats.

In fact, it is downright imprudent. When it comes to boats, lowest price means de facto lowest quality. If you would buy the lowest quality boat, you might as well seek out the cheapest lawyer and the lowest priced doctors and surgeons.

How about a cheap printer, toaster or vacuum cleaner? You’ve been there, done that and know that what you get isn’t going to last very long, and that in the end you will end up buying the same product over and over.

How many cheap toasters will you buy over a life time, and will not the cost of all those cheap ones end up exceeding the cost of just one good one? (I’d guess I’ve had at least six or seven.)

There are some things for which it is not wise to make selections based on lowest price, and boats are surely one of them.

Millions of people fall for the well-planned trap of buying new cars every few years because they just have to have the latest and shiniest vehicle.

We see that gleaming new vehicle sitting in their driveway, but what we usually don’t see is the mountain of accumulated debt they’ve run up just to make themselves feel good.

People may get away with this sort of vanity buying with a car, but if you value your future, you surely don’t want to do that with a boat. And beware that boat dealers are now trying to mimic the auto industry by getting people to do just that by coming up with clever ways to “trade up.”

Falling for the trap of buying a new boat with a trade-in is akin to taking fistfuls of hundred dollar bills and throwing them out the window. You don’t stand a chance of getting a fair price for you current boat.

In the eyes of the buyer, issues of quality often take a back seat to style, luxury and interior accommodations.

There came a time when the boat building industry stopped building just “boats” and began creating “consumer products.”

There was a time, not too long ago, when most boat builders were in the business for the love of boats. A time when making money did not reign supreme.

Those days are largely gone, and most of boat building today is just corporate business turning out corporate products, though there exists a fringe market of custom boats and a handful of high quality boat builders.

Though the prices on their products are often stunning, they provide a good price contrast between high quality boats and the consumer market quality boats.

Indeed, I can think of no better way to grasp the huge differences in quality than to carefully examine a custom boat.

The term “consumer products” translates to mean that boats are no longer designed and built to serve the functions that boats heretofore normally served, but instead are designed by marketing types to create vanity sales.

Along with a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage, their goal was to put a boat in every garage and dock.

It didn’t matter whether it was a fat chicken or diseased chicken, so long as that chicken looks really good. Never mind the effect on the consumer if the chicken is fed fat to increase the weight and therefore profits.

Why should they worry that the customer dies of cardiovascular disease when the population continues to grow regardless, so they never perceive a potential shortage of customers.

The new design philosophy is sex appeal and status symbols.

Not to worry whether a boat is a practical vessel designed to navigate the waters with; what the consumer wants is a status symbol and fashion statement; the practicality of a boat is deemed irrelevant to getting them sold in large numbers.

The marketing types know that if you can create a style trend, the style will perpetuate itself because people are like sheep in that they want what everybody else has as long as it is the latest fashion.

So if stylish, sexy looking boats that are utterly impractical become the norm, then that is what people will buy. Vanity became the name of the game. Unfortunately, the marketing people are exactly correct.

This could never happen unless boating could be turned into a mass recreation, and so the industry set about doing just that.

Somewhere in the mid 1980’s they succeeded and the number of boats in existence reached 22 million by 1990, a high water mark that has since receded to around 20 million.

My viewpoint may sound overly cynical, but when you compare any well built boat to the typical entry-level class of boat, I think you’ll agree that I’m actually being rather kind.

Part of the problem can be laid at the feet of boat buyers themselves.

Far too may people have been willing to spend very large amounts of money without an adequate understanding of what they’re buying.

No doubt they do so, in part, due high levels of consumer trust in most other products, trust that can be, and all too often is, badly misplaced when buying a boat.

Like 401k investing in the stock market, many unknowledgeable people were lured by stock brokers advertising with the siren song of huge profits in high technology, running the NASDAQ up to 5,000.

As of this writing, the NASDAQ sits at about 1200, meaning that investors lost over 5 trillion, yes, trillion dollars, on an investment bubble created almost entirely by advertising.

If you could sit in my seat, you’d view with amazement at how wealthy men, who are capable of shelling out a quarter million in discretionary spending, are daily taken to the cleaners by boat hucksters.

How they swallow some of the most lame-brained excuses by boat salesmen – men who often hardly know the bow from the stern – as to why their expensive new toy is falling apart.

How they get the run-around for months until nearly a year later it begins to dawn on the boat owner that he’s been had, and that the manufacturer isn’t about to make good on his highly touted warranty.

This is a daily occurrence in my office and I’ve got the e-mails to prove my point. It’s truly amazing some of the things that intelligent men will put up with.

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