Well I suppose someone up the food chain decided Ricoh needed a higher average gross margin. So, in their infinite wisdom, they decided to take away the GSA Promo pricing for down the street type accounts; assuming of course all the sales we have made utilizing the GSA Promo pricing will continue to poor in. What they should have done, if they had their thinking caps on, since a majority of sales are lease sales, would have been to tack on an additional 3-5 points to the DLL/Citi RMAP lease rates that would come back to Ricoh thus increasing their margin. This, due to the ultra competitive RMAP lease rates, would have left a valuable program intact, allowed us to remain very competitve, appeased the GSA Contract folks and increased Ricoh's average gross margin. But heh...what the heck do we know...were just copier salespeople :-0
Like I have said for several years...you would think, by the very difficult nature of doing business with Ricoh, their corporate goal is SALES PREVENTION. In fact don't they now have a Sales Prevention Team ;-\?
Dan