DMC Northwest?

[David T]

I see something alot less sinister. Some of the franchises see that they can stop being franchises and can stop paying tribute to DMCH. Doesn't mean they will (or can) stop doing business with them. They all need each other to some extent and will figure out a new way to get along. Because they are no longer "partners" they may lose some of the discounts they had so parts prices to them may increase which they will just pass along to their customers. In a perverse way this may actually be good for individual owners of "good" cars. If the parts prices increase, so shall the value of a good car, since it will just cost more to make a bad car a good one because of the higher price of parts. Each shop has it's local geographic market so they don't compete directly against each other except for mail order parts. They can overcome that by increasing their service prices. If they have a backlog of work that is easy. Some shops may also take in other exotic cars to balance out the workload. As usual things change and life goes on. Adapt or die. DMCH's failure to come out with a "new" car must be a contributing factor to this.

[Shep]

On the ten grand figure, that's for registering it in every country in the world that has a trademark system in place. Also could be lower, but it is in the thousands, that much I do know. Some places with zero market value are enormously expensive. UK and US you can file for nothing, or next to it. I used a lawyer because, well, I didn't know about self-filing, and the guys I made my business through had a $100 gift card for this lawyer site, so that's what I used it on. Definitely didn't save time, took 6-9 months each, but was easy and hey legal advice thrown in for free too.

As far as ".com" goes, I actually meant that instead of RaccinIndustries.com, my site is Raccin.Industries -- so "industries" is the part after the dot, not "com". This works well because my entire business name IS the URL.

".com" is still fairly standard, no one's going to knock someone for using it yet, but using a different suffix beyond the typical ones is seen as more modern and innovative by prospective website viewers, and gives users a more positive first impression all other things equal. Paraphrasing a few SEO gurus there -- note that this doesn't impact perceptions of the products offered and is probably a millennial thing. But being a web developer for six years, "com" is here to stay, anything new is trendy or trending depending on how it fares.

I'm going to smack the idiot that told me all of this, I think he may have been yanking my chain (can you smack people through phones yet?)

Said idiot and I are now even. Yep, he was messing with me. Guess he's just as gullible as I am!

I think David T's on the money, franchising fees gone, if the others are faring well, why not? But I do stand by my commentary on the franchise parts. Midwest's door sills and DMC Cal's leather binnacles are just two examples off the top of my head that really ought to make their way onto the pages of the main Store.DeLorean.com site somewhere. Midwest used to have a couple pages on their stuff, California never bothered to from what I know, but now all three are the same store site, and it only shows DMCH products. For the first couple months, they actually did show some Midwest products, but not since then. This doesn't help when you need a picture of things to browse through however.

[Riley88]

I was told by Toby he had to move his shop because the guy who actually owned the spot and garage they rented from raised the rent ALOT, so rather than give in and pay he basically said no and relocated. Source: car is being worked on by Toby at dmcnw, but dont quote me eh

[sdg3205]

I had heard that as well; that the rent had gone up substantially. Been there, also moved.

[Lwanmtr]

Yerp, Toby moved shop..sadly mean I'll need to drive another 20 minutes further when I get parts I have to pick up. As for anything regarding partnerships with DMCH, I have no clue.

[mluder]

The OP was correct though... DMCNW are no longer listed under the See Our Locations drop down on Delorean.com.
That would seem to indicate the affiliation is dissolved.

I hope to continue to do business with Toby as much as possible. He's not only my mechanic of choice but I also consider him a friend. Hopefully the lack of franchising fees and increased business from potentially being able to work on other cras will allow him to still source priced from Houston and sell them on without too much of a mark-up.

Cheers
Steve

[Lwanmtr]

Yeah I do all mine through Toby as well...cept the one time i had a gift card and had to go through dmch.

[Dangermouse]

I fully agree with this and tell people this every day. Doesn't matter if you are anything.com - very few new customers type "something.com" into an address bar these days - it's all done on Google, a domain name is near-irrelevant.

Going OT here.

Yes and no. IMHO ".com" (or .co.uk or .uk) is still the gold standard for websites in certain conditions

If I am going to a common easy to remember site, like the BBC.com, I don't google "BBC" and pick the appropriate link; I type "BBC" in the address bar and hit CTRL-Enter.

For DeLoreanGo, I don't know if it's .com or .uk or .industries, so I will Google

However, at the other end, if I get an email from someone with an email address of @deloreango.website I will treat that with a lot more suspicion than @deloreango.uk

[Shep]

Most older email servers automatically flag ".industries" for example as spam because they don't think it's a valid domain extension. That's why all the email links on my site forward to a single Gmail account with those clever little extension bits for easy sorting. Replying then becomes not an issue as pretty much everyone works with Gmail.

If you get an email out of the blue, I think anyone in their right mind would have raised suspicions, that doesn't necessarily apply to .com and .industries distinctly. Most people are going to go by email title and the name associated with the email address rather than the email address itself though, given this is how emails are displayed in Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, Hotmail, pretty much any email system nowadays. The dead giveaway becomes when they send an email from dhflemvu.com.gz and it's a long-lost relative. They generally don't email from a legitimate-looking domain name that doesn't offer a free email service from my (admittedly limited) experience.

Summary: it's all about perceptions.

On the Northwest location being removed from the DMCH site, doesn't it list their address and contact info? Standard practice is to remove this when a shop migrates to help mitigate customer contact while the employees work on the moving process. I know at least when you click on some of them it provides their address and phone number, but their address is now outdated and the phone really shouldn't be called with new inquiries that they cannot tackle until the move is complete.

First job I sat within clear earshot of the CEO for years and when we moved early on he got a few laughs at how many people assumed we all got fired when we were removed from the main site, despite the mass emails sent out to the whole corporate structure explaining we were moving. It was an interesting job for sure.

[SKnight]

I was told by Toby he had to move his shop because the guy who actually owned the spot and garage they rented from raised the rent ALOT, so rather than give in and pay he basically said no and relocated. Source: car is being worked on by Toby at dmcnw, but dont quote me eh

This is what I heard as well. The owner of the complex he was in jacked up the rates substantially and Toby decided it wasn't worth it so he moved out towards Redmond. I noticed a few of the other businesses that were next to him also left, this price increase may end up backfiring on the owner.