by bobcraige on Wed May 02, 2007 10:29 am There has been much discussion and speculation about Olympia. I too have waited long periods and in fact am now waiting for parts for a very long time. While this can be annoying, it must be taken in perspective. Olympia is a tiny artisan company who basically hand builds new machines of exceptional quality to order. All of the vintage machines that we seek parts for predate the current company. They range from about fifteen to forty years in age. Olympia is committed to supporting these old machines, but it is a huge and often thankless task. In todays throw away world, no one supports products of this age. You are lucky if manufacturers support products beyond three years after they are discontinued. As Olympia's primary business is building new hand crafted machines, support of these older products must fit into the limited resources of the company.
It has been my experience that they go out of their way to provide support and parts, BUT often it takes time. What many fail to realize is that original spares stocks for these machines have long ago been exhausted. This means that many parts must be fabricated from scratch and no longer with the economies of production quantity runs. When the machines were originally built, it was normal to order enough parts for the production run and a quantity of spares for the reasonable future. Forty years later is not the reasonable future. While one may just need a replacement fork and be very impatient why Olympia just does not send it, often it requires Olympia start from scratch to remanufacture a new small production run of forks. The normal answer from manufacturers is that the part is no longer available, but Olympia endeavors to fill these orders-as time, resources and production schedules permit. Most customers understand and are grateful that Olympia cares enough to provide this unique support for machines that are often older than their owners. Unfortunately, there are some customers, who believe it is Olympia's obligation to immediately and instantly drop everything and fill their parts order. Olympia has found that ninety percent of its problems have come from ten percent of its customers. By simply not dealing with these customers, the majority of problems immediately go away. They choose to not deal with these customers and will not respond to problem customers. One has to understand that in business, you simply cannot put five hours labor into selling a hundred dollars worth of spares.
Some customers, who apparently have nothing whatever to do, chose to resurrect absolute junk machines despite all indications to the contrary. While it is their choice to do so, that does not mean that the manufacturer cares to waste endless time dealing with such crusades. Worse still, at least one such customer felt it prudent to publish a report of the performance of Olympia in servicing his crusade. Another has spent endless hours arguing with Olympia that their web site did not work. Indeed, it works very well, though it takes a little work to figure it out. Give Olympia a chance, and they will do a great job for you, but give them a hard time, and you will find them totally unresponsive. They receive thousands of emails a month. This is a monumental job to wade through. Many of these are spam, some valid, some not. As a small manufacturer, they simply cannot afford the time to answer endless emails asking questions that are answered on their web site, in these forums and elsewhere. They also cannot afford the time to give daily updates on parts orders.
I know first hand that Olympia desires to support not only their current machines, but the older products as well. One vendor has even been quoted as saying that Olympia does not support it's old machines to force the sale of new ones. Nothing could be further from the truth. As owners of these special machines I think we can help this by being understanding and patient so that Olympia does not follow all others by deciding it is less work, expense and aggravation not to bother taking care of us. The endless stream of speculation, conjecture and complaints only serves to aggravate a company trying to help its customers.
!. Espresso passion is pretty innocent as "internet obsessions "can go.
