Hello, 07 Shelby, and thanks for the welcome. I will be glad to answer any questions to the best of my ability, feel free to ask anything.
As to what we charged, we didn't technically charge anything. We are a small store in a rural farm community. We have a very loyal, yet very frugal customer base, for which we are fortunate. When news of the Shelby first broke we were all excited, as we are passionate about Mustangs. One problem we were immediately faced with was price strucure. We knew that this was going to be an extremely hot item, with limited availability and that due to the size of our store we would only be gauranteed one. As we got closer and closer to the GT500 being reality, we began to get local interest, but no one around here was willing to pay a premium for the car, which is fine and in a sense understandable. But the other side of that coin is manifold. The biggest consideration was this- why should we sell the car for X amount when big city stores, not 200 miles from us, are getting in excess of $20,000 over MSRP? It is a philosophical and ethical delima that we wrestled with, but the bottom line is that it was also a question of survival and business sense. Bare in mind that some of us are still recovering from last year's Employee Pricing fiasco. It drove many of us to the brink of closing the doors. Yes we sold a great number of cars, but at almost no profit, and the market has been in turmoil for the domestics ever since. Sorry, that's a whole different discussion, but it is relevant. Anyhow, here's how we handled it: enter EBAY. That way, it was a level playing field and anyone iterested could name their own price. Not a single one of our local customers was upset and several of them bid, but did not win. That way we didnt offend our local customer base, and we also opened ourselves to a global market. In the end, we sold them all for at least $17, 350 over MSRP. In fact, one of them was sold to someone outside of the ebay community, who called the store and made an offer that we accepted. So in the end, we didn't have to charge anything, we just accepted offers; the cars priced themselves. To put that in perspective,one of my customers now has about 62,000$ wrapped up in a factory order for his very own 2007 Shelby GT500 coupe with every option, in the color scheme that he wanted, that will be supercharged, 500 horsepower and will hit 60 mph in about 4.5 seconds. Did we do the right thing? Hard to say,there will be people who agree and those that disagree, but one thing I know is that for the fortunate few who will own these cars, money will be the farthest thing from his or her mind when they drop the clutch and nail it. At that point, I'm sure it will be worth evey penny!
