Brands Calling Dealers to Find Their Own Service Techs??? -- The Council Responds

📩 Apply to Join the Retail Council Here: https://tally.so/r/vGGdq0 Jon said it plainly at the start of this one: the responses to this week’s service technician question were the most profanity-laced answers the Retail Council has ever sent back. The question was which brand is hardest to find qualified service technicians for. Three came back by name: Dacor, Miele, and BlueStar. But the detail that really lit people up was that some brands are calling dealers to ask them to help find service technicians. Jon’s framing on that: it is not a logistics problem. It is a philosophical one. The brand made a promise to the dealer when they asked to be on that floor. The dealer made a promise to the customer at the point of sale. And now the brand is calling the dealer to keep the promise the brand made. The dealer absorbs the cost, the relationship damage, and the customer fallout for an operational failure that was never theirs to own. Dacor drew most of the heat. Samsung plugged Dacor into the Samsung service infrastructure after the acquisition. That network is large, but it was designed for consumer electronics and mass market appliances. The technicians inside it are not trained for luxury ranges or refrigeration columns, and the experience the customer gets directly contradicts the luxury promise they were sold. Miele is the more complicated one. The brand takes service seriously, and in markets where the infrastructure is strong it works. The problem is geography. In markets with one authorized servicer covering too large an area, the capacity is not there. The dealers raising this concern the loudest are the ones who believe in Miele most, which means the brand is at risk of losing the floor space that matters most to them. BlueStar grew faster than their service network could keep up with. Their products are technically demanding and require real training. That training takes time and investment to build across a network. Jon does not think the situation is out of control, but the gap between floor presence and service capacity needs to close.