Factory LaserPerformance Store Update

Geophizz

Geophizz

Member
It appears that Laser Performance is coming out of the doldrums. I was at the factory store in Portsmouth, RI on Monday, and saw some encouraging things. They have renamed and completely revamped the store. It's now called "Laser Performance Sail and Sport, Rhode Island". They have replaced the entire staff and wiped out all of the old inventory that had been hanging around taking up space. (The guy in the Laser ads apparently doesn't work there anymore). They got rid of the half-Laser that was hanging from the ceiling, and replaced it with a half 420, fully rigged (or half rigged?) against a wall on the sales floor. They have more boats on the sales floor and now they have a dedicated parts area that is well stocked. Right now they are leaning heavily towards Laser parts, but there's a good supply of Sunfish parts and they say that more are coming. Peeking in the windows on the factory side, I saw for the first time in a long time a ton of Lasers and Sunfish stacked up ready to go.

They also now do repairs, which they didn't do before. You bring your boat in, and they give a free fixed price estimate.
 
Thanks Geophizz.

Glad to read that things aren't quite as bad with LP as some of the folks on the Laser and Sunfish Forums imagined...
More good news: there was a factory tour during the Sunfish Nationals.
 
I am glad Laser Performance is working on its PR with tour of the factory, freebees, etc. Who knows, one day they might even start delivering boats again. Sorry, the sarcasm you are sensing in my comment is certainly not geared at you, GeoPhizz or Wavedancer.

I ignored posts in this forum -and others- that warned against the practices of Laser Performance. Some of the posts were 2 years old, some of them I blamed on bad luck, in short, I wanted my boat so badly I decided that surely things had been fixed if they ever were broken. After all, what could be wrong with the manufacturer of such a successful boat as the Laser? Unfortunately, this was a wrong bet.

After placing my order –and making the required down payment-, I waited patiently for the delivery of my boat. I even took the time to check as the due date was approaching to confirm that things were on track. “Absolutely: your boat is on the truck, ready to be delivered” I was told by my local dealer. A week later, no more truck story, no more estimate on the delivery date, no explanation as to what was happening either. This was to become the pattern of my relationship with Laser Performance. The local dealer, to prove he was not the liar in the story, put me in contact with the partner sales rep. A nice enough guy, as it turned out to be, except for one thing: even he was never able to make things happen. This went on for over 2 months -which by the way, made me miss half of the season- and was punctuated by hopes and blows since, as you may imagine, the boat was “almost” on its way out of the warehouse.

I finally canceled my order and got my money back –at least I had paid the dealer, not Laser Performance, I can only imagine what would have happened then!-. Through my numerous conversations and even research, given how bad things were going, I was able to establish a few things:

  • Laser Performance is in an extremely dire financial situation. They do not pay their suppliers –good luck with parts if you ever get your boat!-, and apparently are not doing any better with freight.
  • Laser Performance does not care about its customers. I know this sounds like an overarching statement from a ticked off customer. But that’s actually accurate. They have very little business honoring their orders or keeping their customers interests in mind (this site is filled with complaints about the way Laser Performance is forcing changes down the throat of its faithful customers). Quite surprisingly though, they do care about marketing. So they spend however little resources they have left optimizing their ranking in google search. But just scroll down a bit and you will see that this post is not isolated: poor –and quite honestly horrible- customer relationship is an established way of doing business for Laser Performance. It blows my mind, but it is their business model.
  • Laser Performance, fortunately, does have some competitors. The up and coming one is RS Sailing –it is sweeping over Europe and its presence in the US is increasing, they have great boats and have a vested interest in making their customers happy-. Depending on what you are looking for, Bic is actually pretty good too and if you are looking for more of a daysailer, Shock (Lido) or Catalina are great options, not to mention less expensive.

I hope that if you read this post, you will be wiser than I was and weigh your options. “Past performance is no guarantee of future results” as they put it in the financial industry. It seems that Laser Performance golden age has long passed and that all that is left of it is an empty shell and a poor marketing scheme.
 
Bart, you never mention what kind of boat you were trying to get or where you were trying to get it sent to. I was in the factory in August and I can tell you there was no shortage of Lasers, Sunfish or Optis - probably over 100 each of Sunfish and Lasers in inventory and a couple stacks of Optis - and there did not appear to be a shortage of parts. So if your story is recent and you were ordering a Sunfish, Laser or Opti, that experience seems unusual. Are you in some remote location where they only rarely ship boats?
 
To back up what Chris wrote, APS had several Lasers and a Sunfish for sale at the Annapolis boat show this past October.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top