Transcript of Video Titled “Massage Chair Industry Update – May 28, 2018”
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Alan: Hi, I’m Dr. Alan Weidner from ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com’ and today is our biweekly massage chair industry update for Monday, May 28th, 2018, also Memorial Day. I hope you have a great Memorial Day. I recently visited Pearl Harbor with a tour. The Arizona exhibit was closed down, but we were able to go out and see the Missouri, the Arizona, and of course, go through the museums on the visitor’s centers, and it was very, very moving, very emotional, and very touching, and if you ever get a chance to go there, I would strongly recommend visiting Pearl Harbor, the historic site. But anyway, thank you to everyone who has served, and sacrificed so much on behalf of this great country. So, Happy Memorial Day.
[SCREEN TEXT: Current Sales]
Alan: Let’s get down to business now. The, you know, the, we have had a bunch of, kind of a bunch of current sales for Memorial Day, and most of these sales will continue on. Most of them will continue on to include Father’s Day next month, but just at the top, just I’ll mention just a couple highlights here on the sales that are kind of – some sales we have on our website are permanent, like they’re always there until the company tells us to take them down, like permanent discounts – but there are some that are periodic sales. And Human Touch right now has, let’s see they’ve got $300 off on their WholeBody 7.1, the ZeroG 3.0, and the ZeroG 5.0. Panasonic has $2000 off on their MA70. We have – let’s see, what other sales of interest – we have $500 off the Luraco iRobotics 7, which that is, probably I would say, that’s our top-selling S-track chair. As a matter of fact, that is our top-selling S-track chair, that, and the Infinity 8500, or 8500X3, those two models.
[SCREEN TEXT: S-Track vs. L-Track]
Alan: Those are very, very popular S-track sale chairs. And of course, the advantage of an S-track over an L-track – the L-track, OK, here’s the – and I’ve written an article about this. You can read it on my blog, or my article library, but the difference between an L-track, the tradeoff between an L-track and an S-track is that the L-track will give you the butt rollers. So, the rollers come down the back, following the S-shape of the curve, and then underneath the seat to massage the glutes, and the piriformis, and the upper hamstring muscles. The S-track only has rollers that come down to the low back, to the, maybe to the top of the tailbone, or the top of the butt muscles. The tradeoff is that, the S-track chair, because it’s not in the shape of an L, the track is not in the shape of an L, it can stretch you better, and then of course, the advantage of the L-track is that you get the butt muscles massaged. So, you don’t get as strong a stretch on the L-track, and on the S-track, you don’t get the butt rollers, or the butt massage. So, that’s kind of the tradeoff, but they’re both great chairs, both great things, and it’s kind of a tradeoff on what’s more important to you, getting the butt muscles massaged, or getting an awesome stretch.
[SCREEN TEXT: Osaki Maestro In Store Now!]
Alan: Let’s see, the Maestro, there’s an instant savings right now on the Maestro. The Maestro is a brand new chair, and boy, it has been very, very popular. We have a floor model in our California showroom, and my staff love it. It’s an Osaki, Osaki Maestro, it’s an expensive chair. It’s $8999, but we have it on for $7999 right now, and I think there may be a sale coming up. Well, anyway, just if you’re interested in the Maestro, or the Ekon, or the Osaki Ekon, or the Human Touch Novo XT, or the Infinity Presidential, those are all kind of the same class of chair, 3D L-tracks, very, very good chairs, and the Maestro, the Maestro’s already sold out on their ‘Brown’ and ‘Beige’ colors, so they just have ‘Black’ right now until June. But also on sale is the – let’s see, what else have we got that’s kind of timely, and only available for a little while – no, that’s about it. There’s other chairs that we have, of course, that have sales. You can go to our website, and click on the Memorial Day Sale title, that will link to the sale page, or you can also go to our Current Deals item on our navigation bar, and on the drop-down menu, select ‘New Chair Specials.’
[SCREEN TEXT: Brown Novo XT Pre-Owned for Sale for $5499!]
Alan: And of course, we also have our pre-owned directory on that menu as well, and you can see what we’ve got. We don’t have a lot any more. We’ve got, I think, three chairs left. One that’s a great deal is a ‘Brown’ Novo XT, and we have it for $5499. That’s an extremely low price. The chair is in perfect condition, immaculate condition, it’s packed up, ready to go. That is a chair you might want to jump on if you’re looking for a really, really good deal. That chair retails for $7999, we got $2500 off on this one, and so anyway, brown Novo XT. That’s a good deal, trust me on this one, and of course, when you buy from our pre-owned directory, you still get the remainder of the warranty for the chair, and that chair comes with a five-year parts-and-labor warranty, because we throw in the extended warranty. So, you’ve got a full warranty, and we include free, you know, standard curbside delivery. Alright, current sales.
[SCREEN TEXT: Old vs. New Chair Models]
Alan: Now, I get asked a lot by people, when they call and ask about massage chairs, they often ask me ‘Well, is it a newer, is that chair newer, or is it older?’ and they’re – and it’s almost like the insinuation is – well, it’s different, because some people call asking about if the chair is a newer model or an older model because they want to have the latest, up to date stuff. Or they want a chair that’s been around a while, that they know has probably been tweaked by the factory over various production runs, and the chair is, it runs better, it has a lower failure rate, and I would say to that, yes on both counts. The newer chairs come with newer technology, maybe, you know, maybe a better remote control, better massage chair features, maybe a more sophisticated roller mechanism, maybe a more sophisticated airbag technology, etcetera, etcetera. The older chairs may not have the newer sophisticated technology, but they still are great massage chairs, but because they’re older, and the company that imports them has gone through a number of production runs with that chair, and with the factory back in China or Japan, they have, I wouldn’t say perfected it, but they would, I would say that the chairs probably have a lower failure rate because they’ve corrected some of the little glitches that didn’t work, based on warranty feedback from the importer. You know, a classic example of what I think of is when I was talking to Cliff Levin, he’s the president of Inada USA, and he said that the old Inada i1A, I think it was the i1A, that chair had a near-zero failure rate. And the reason it did was because that chair had been popular for so long, and the Japanese factory had tweaked the mechanics, and the technology, and the electronics of the chair over time, that they had pretty much almost perfected the chair. It was a near-zero failure rate. That’s pretty remarkable, and with a new Inada – basically, it’s still good, it has less than a 1% failure rate, but it was not near – they’re not near zero percent when they’re new. So, I would assume that the Chinese companies do this same thing, that the Chinese chairs will tweak based on feedback from the importer, whether it’s Infinity, or Osaki, or Human Touch, or uKnead, or whatever, and they’ll tweak it, and make each run a little bit better, a little bit less problematic, based on the feedback of the customers, and you know, a less amount of warranty claims. Anyway, so that is new versus old technology, and I will write an article, a blog post about that in the near future, but I wouldn’t be too hung up on it. If you want the latest technology, of course, you got to buy the newer chair. If you want a chair that you think is, or you’re hoping for is, a lesser failure rate, an old, established model that’s been around a while, certainly can’t hurt you.
[SCREEN TEXT: Chinese vs. American vs. Japanese Chairs]
Alan: And one last thing I want to talk about is Japanese versus Chinese versus US chairs, I have talked about this before, but I still get a lot of calls about it, so I’m just going to mention it briefly. And you know, we talk about chairs that are made in China, chairs that are made in Japan, chairs that are made in America, and that, when we say ‘made in America,’ or ‘made in Japan,’ or ‘made in China,’ that may not be a fully descript way of categorizing the make of a chair, and I’ll tell you why. For example, the US-made chair by Luraco, all the electronics, and the computer components are made in the USA, but the non-critical components are imported from Taiwan. So, it’s claimed to be a made-in-USA chair, and it very well is, based on import criteria, and I mean, if the chair is made 100% in China, and people are saying it’s made in America, well, that’s a lie, it’s an outright lie, and that’s not appropriate. But a chair like that, it has American components, and Taiwanese components, a chair like the Inada DreamWave, that chair is claimed to be made in Japan, and it is made in Japan, but there are some non-critical components that are imported from China, so it has Chinese components. There’s a chair that I’ve heard called – I can’t even remember what it’s called – but it’s a chair that’s imported, is it, oh, I wish I could remember what it was called. It’s Fuji-something, not Fujiiryoki, or not Fuji, but it’s a chair that’s imported by a particular retailer that has stores in Southern California, Northern California, and in Texas, from what I understand, and they’re saying that this chair is made in, 100% made in Japan, when we know that it’s actually created in – it’s actually manufactured in the Eastpau factory in Xhao Ming in China – but it passes through Japan en route to America. So, they say that that constitutes being made in Japan, and so, and then there’s, of course, Chinese chairs, and when they say a Chinese chair, usually it is 100% Chinese made. But sometimes, we get a little hung up on made in Japan, or made in the USA, or made in China, when the components probably come from all over the place. There are some chairs that are made 100% in Japan, from what I understand, the Osaki Japan 4D, 4S, and the 4.0 are made 100% in Japan. There’s a new model coming out, and I still can’t say much about it, but it’s a Japanese chair with foot rollers that is 100% made in Japan. Oh, and of course, Panasonic, the Panasonic chairs are made in China, but designed and engineered in Japan, and overseen by the Japanese engineers. So, when things are said that they’re made in China, or made in Japan, or made in USA, there is, there is some wiggle room as to what the real origin of that chair is, and so, typically the Japanese and American chairs have a less than 1% failure rate, and have, you know, are expected to last you 15 years or longer, Chinese chairs typically are, have a 2 to 5%, maybe even lower now, with some of these newer, upper-echelon chairs, made in really, really good factories, maybe a 1 to 5% failure rate, and they will last you up to 10 years, and maybe a bit longer now with these upper-echelon massage chairs. And there are so many factories in China, there’s giant, and there’s small factories, where cheaper chairs are made, where there’s a poorer, a more, a poorer quality control in place, protocol in place, lesser-quality parts are used, and so the chairs come to America, and they’re cheaper, and you can buy them for cheap on, you know, I don’t know. I’m not going to, of course, I won’t mention any names, or companies, but there are chairs that are cheaper, and then there’s chairs that are really, really cheap, and made in cheap factories, but the company charges an arm and a leg for them, and discounts a huge amount, making you think that you’re getting a very, very high quality, expensive chair for a better price, and that’s a little misleading as well. But anyway, to make a long story even longer, the Chinese versus Japanese versus American versus Taiwanese, there is wiggle room in some of the facts. And anyway, and that speaks, that, anyway, there’s so many factors that come in to play. I’d like to talk about no-name brand chairs, and you know, misleading things, but I’ll talk about that on another video.
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Alan: Anyway, that’s about it for this week. I hope you found this video helpful in some way. If you have any questions, of course, give me a call at 888-259-5380, I’m always available, and if you don’t get through to me, you can speak to one of my chair reps, or leave a message and I’ll get back to you.
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Alan: And of course, if you found the video helpful, please feel free to thumbs up ‘Like’ us on our YouTube channel, and of course, share this video on your social media platforms, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Instagram, Twitter, whatnot. We just appreciate you helping us spread the word about massage chairs. Well, I’m Dr. Alan Weidner from ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com,’ and I will see you again in two weeks. Bye bye.
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