I really hate being a captive customer to these jackyls. Not content with charging $20k for an ad under the 'Glass' heading, they just established a new heading under 'Windshields'to milk more hard-earned money from us. I may try to establish some kind of local glass company consortium to purchase YP advertising and limit our ad sizes and placement. If you could get every shop to sign an agreement, you could each save $10-15k per year. What are your thoughts on this?

The yellow pages is a cesspool for price shoppers who have nothing better to do than call 183 glass shops to get the lowest possible price so they can ride into oblivion .The rest call the # on the back of the insurance card and end up with safelite because theyre too GD scared to stand up and not be a lemming.

I guess you have to say something about how much the insurance companies suck to get a valid response, here. Maybe its a good thing a lot of the whiners will not be in business in 5 years.

5 years or so ago, i made people who answer the phone and deal with customers ask how people found us.

90 percent overall were repeat customers. of the phone calls over 85% of the callers were the ones looking for the cheapest price.

i have down sized my add, and things are slow, but i think everybody around here is slow. i think yellow pages just need to be the bare minimum. if you find a marketing piece that works, let us all know.

the only advertising that actually worked was a cupon book, we were not charged to put the ad in, we gave away a free pitfill, and not the kind of add that we charge the insurance company. it was free.

people had to pay to buy the cupon books and we got alot of cupons. at least we figured that would get people in the door and see what we are like, hopefully they would continue to use us.

i'm not sure it actually paid for itself, but we got alot of coupons. After the first two years of that coupon book they started putting more than one glass shop in there so we quit using it.

The idea is a noble one; however, it is the low-balling bottom feeders with the full-page/double-page ads the prosper from the current YP arrangement.
The question we must ask ourselves is: Why would the low-ballers want to help improve the situation in the AGR industry? How can you sell them on this idea when their business model is to kill you with big ads, ridiculously low prices, bad service, bad installs, and techs doing 10+ mobile jobs per day?
What incentive do they have to participate? 10-15K/year is a small price for them to pay to put the screws to the good quality shops.