January 24th, 2014

Earlier this week, during one of the drier afternoons, I headed off to a Kawasaki dealer in West London, mainly to have a look around and possible ask about a bike. The ride out of London was nice and quick with no real issues and I easily found the dealership, but I have to say that I was a little disappointed with what I found. I walked in and I was the only customer. The dealership appeared to be a double shop front, but one of those was being refurbished, which considering the time of year, was expected I guess. I did however, find a few things that were very disappointing. The main issue I had that every single bike, even those on the far side of the opposite shop front were covering in dust and crap. Every single one. These included brand new bikes at £10,000. Ten grand. Some clearly had more of a covering than others, but it really looked like thought to either a) move them or b) cover them up. On the pavement outside, a nice collection of second hand bikes including a first gen ZX6R and a red GSXR 600 were parked up, sensibly locked together. None of these had price tags on. None. The final thing that annoyed me, its that I was ignored. Not a hello, nor are you okay, not one single acknowledgement. That is a poor show by anybodies standards. Now I don't want to be pestered by staff, but what I do what, especially when we are potentially talking about a pretty big purchase, the cheapest bike would still be £1000, is a simple hello.
Now the place clearly isn't my business, but if it were mine and I was having building work down of this magnitude, I would close up shop for however long it took and cover the bikes properly. I will say that this particular customer won't be going back. If they care so little about their bikes, then I doubt they'd care much for the customers either.