Scott J. Michaels of SerpentCity poor business ethics and just plain rude ~ AVOID

Well I got this lovely email out of the blue from this person. Just wanted to give everyone a heads up on this super nice person.. He had emailed me about 9 months ago asking me to raise my prices on flexwatt and I POLITELY told him that my prices were fair to the customer and I would not be raising them. I know he sells on Kingsnake but haven't seen him here. He is supposed to be a Vet but the Vets I have spoken with and delt with don't talk and act that unprofessionally. Again just a heads up on how you may be treated if you deal with this person.. All this rudeness and unprofessionalism over a heating element.. Imagine if you had a snake die or an order lost.. Would you get the same reply from him..

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Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 23:44:41 -0600 (CST)
To: matt@mgreptiles.com
Subject: Message about: 3" FLEXWATT ON SALE
From: serpentcity@comcast.net Add to Address Book Add Mobile Alert


Hey GO **** YOURSELF you little worm
Scott J. Michaels DVM RPh the "supposed" doctor
God Bless my ass
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Sent 11:44 PM, Nov 17th, 2005 from I.P. Address 24.15.215.180

Isint that nice..lol

Matt,
Did you inform him of this thread?

Scott did this?
My dealings and or conversations with him have been nothing but professional. He does come off as a very durect guy, but this is out of character for him to do this.

Did he ever respond to you about your response in regards to your flexwatt prices?

I no longer have the email but got a similar one while I was at the Tampa show a month or two back. He was pretty sarcastic but not quite as bad as above. He didnt seem to like the fact I dont charge for making connections on heat tape. I guess his sole source of income is heat tape connections or something. I expect he will get over it, or maybe not. Could care less and dont have time for him and such B.S. anyhow.

Originally Posted by justcage

He had emailed me about 9 months ago asking me to raise my prices on flexwatt and I POLITELY told him that my prices were fair to the customer and I would not be raising them.

Do you still have the original e-mail Matt? It sounds illegal to me, to ask one's competitor to raise his price.

Originally Posted by justcage

He had emailed me about 9 months ago asking me to raise my prices on flexwatt

What balls he has to tell someone they have to raise their prices on something. It's really none of his business. If Matt wants to give his flexwatt away, it's still Matt's business and no one else's.

fair market value
Definition

The price that an interested but not desperate buyer would be willing to pay and an interested but not desperate seller would be willing to accept on the open market assuming a reasonable period of time for an agreement to arise.



Matt you sell your items at a price that you feel you can make an adequate number of sales and make an adequate profit. That is what FMV is all about!

Well, that was not very nice.

Originally Posted by Junkyard

Well, that was not very nice.

LOL, that's putting it mildly.

Personally, I don't think a person that is capable of sending a message like that, especially for no apparant reason, doesn't belong in business in the first place.

I find this humorous for a couple of reasons.
It's not funny at all that he treated Matt or Richard that way. There is absolutely no excuse for that sort of unwarranted behavior.

It's humorous though that he apparently takes the selling of flexwatt so seriously. He is a DVM. Now I don't know about in Chicago, but I live in a small town in the mountains of NC and the vets here live pretty well. If he has a working practice I would think that whether he makes a few bucks off flexwatt on the side or not would be irrelevant. In fact in the past I have wondered why he bothered to sell stuff like that at all. After all he does breed higher end pythons and is a DVM, just always looked to me like selling dry goods would be a waste of time financially. This is why I don't sell a bunch of supplies myself, it's not an economically productive use of my time. Why spend time with the emails then time to package and ship the order to make $20 or so profit when I could spend that same time in the snake room taking care of animals that will generate far more income than any dry goods business I could gain ever would.

I also find it funny that he would even ask a competitor to raise his prices. You can only assume that he actually thought they would do it, although I can think of no viable reason why they would. It just amazes me that rather than attempting to be competetive or giving it up that this would even be considered.
As an aside I would think that would be considered price fixing and to my knowledge is illegal.
You see it in the high end morph business too. One breeder drops his prices and some of the other breeders get mad and talk trash about him. I can at least see their point if one person drops the price 5 grand, but the reaction still isn't justified. In this case though such a big to do over what, a nickel a foot on heat tape, that's just sad really.