I'd done my homework and knew what I wanted so walked out of my local Woodcraft store with my first Festool and a smile on my face. The smile was because I had a new Festool in my hands, not because the salesman had made me feel good about the purchase. In fact, I knew more than anyone in the store and I hadn't even seen a single Festool in person. All the sales staff could do was show me a photo copied spec sheet. One salesman even made a big point to say he couldn't understand why anyone would pay such a ridiculous price for a complicated tool in a fancy plastic case, when they had such good prices on Porter Cable. I thought surely, this couldn't be indicative of Woodcraft in general so a few weeks later I visited the other Woodcraft here in town. Boy was I disappointed. The three salesmen there said that they had been stocking Festool for several months but only one guy there new how they worked and that I'd have to come back next Monday when he'd be there. That was over a year ago and they still only have one guy that knows anything about Festool and I get the opinion that he'd be a lot happier if the Festool display would just go away. Despite this experience, and not wanting to wait for UPS, I bought my next Festool from Woodcraft. These guys are the best anti-sales, sales-force a company could ask for.
When I found out our local Rockler was stocking Festool I hoped they would raise the sales staff bar and give Woodcraft a little competition. Silly me! They know (and care) even less than the guys at Woodcraft.
Thankfully, I took the recommendations of many of you here at FOG and called Bob Marino. WOW! What a breath of fresh air. He took time to answer all of my questions, never once made me feel like I stupid, and busted his tail to make sure I got my order quickly. Now, if Bob only sold washers, dryers, TVs and car parts! I'll still go to Rockler and Woodcraft to "see" Festools but I'll only purchase them from Bob.
As for QWAS posting: " The USA needs more Festool sales to get the corporate attention, and to get our tools stamped in imperial rather than metric." I disagree. I must admit when I bought my first Festool, I didn't like everything being metric. I had plenty of high quality measuring devices that were imperial and considered the metric measurements on Festools to be a nuisance. I eventually lost (actually my wife permanently borrowed) my best tape measure so I found myself with an excuse to go to my local Woodcraft store. I discovered they were selling a new metric/imperial tape made by FastCap so I decided to try it out. The more I used it, the more I found out that working in metric was much easer than figuring fractions and using metric measurements in my project plans yielded better accuracy with the finished project. Now, a little more than a year later, I use metric measurements 80% of the time. In fact, I don't have any problem going back and forth between metric and imperial measurements. I hope Festool keeps shipping metric tools to the US. I'd hate to have to revert back to using my calculator for converting fractions.
For those of you who don't want to use metric measurements because you can't find metric rulers I'd suggest you check GEI International at:
http://www.geionline.com/catalogs/catalog.asp?prodid=4420301&showprevnext=1
They manufacture stainless steel rulers in various lengths and in metric/English. I've got several of their rules and must say they are much higher quality that anything I've found locally. I don't understand why local stores that are selling Festool don't make an effort to stock some metric measuring tools. Don't buy the metric rules that Woodcraft sells. I purchased two different sets and both were curved, not straight! The guys at Woodcraft even admitted that they'd gotten several sets back because of this.
