Customer service, of course, but how far do you live from your dealer or LHS?
If your dealer is close by, then the customer service has a large impact.
If you live a considerable distance from your dealer, then how much benefit can he be to you? You will probably end up dealing directly with the factory any way. This then reduces the choice of dealership to a price and delivery question.
In other words if you live in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, or Philadelphia your access to the dealer/LHS is very close. His ability to help/service you is much better. If you live in Kansas, West Texas or Wyoming its a completely different situation.
If you plotted the dealers on a US map with dots of the dealers, where the size of the dot represents their sales volume of Lionel you will see what I mean. Do the same thing for MTH dealers, Atlas dealers, Weaver etc. There are huge areas of the country where the dealer has little to no impact. You need to ship it back to them, so they ship it to the factory?
Move the discussion back up stream from the dealer. If the product is high quality with very little defects then . . . Wow what a thought.
Consider what Honda, Toyota, Nissan and Mazda did to the US automakers. High quality usually beats good customer service every time. It only takes one manufacturer making high quality products that the consumer wants, to force everyone else to improve their quality. Look at the consumer reports issue of automobile frequency of repair. You can quickly tell which pages have Honda, Toyota, Nissan etc on them by the color of the low repair dots.
Remember when Sears tools were guaranteed for life?
