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Why is it so expensive?


THERE ARE MANY PRODUCTS WITH HIGH PRICES

The question can be asked about Mercedes, Porsche, Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, Lamborghini and BMW cars. It can be asked about $25,000 Swiss watches, any diamond ring etc. There are products that cater only to a specialty market where people are willing to pay a higher price for quality and utility and those products are manufactured in small numbers and therefore are more expensive to manufacture and to market.

THE ROM ACTUALLY IS EXTREMELY INEXPENSIVE IN UTILITY

The ROM is actually the absolute least expensive way to get the health and fitness benefits that are normally obtained from over 90 minutes of exercise per day. If your time is worth at least 5 dollars or 5 euros per hour then the ROM is an absolute bargain.

The cost of the ROM spread over 30 years comes out to $1.45 per day plus of course 4 minutes of cost of time per user. If four people in a household or office are using it then the cost is less than $0.40 per day per person. How do we know that the ROM will last at least 30 years with 4 people using it? Even though 90% of ROM machines go to private homes, 10% go to commercial uses such as health clubs and training facilities for sports. We have a few ROM machines for over 17 years in health clubs where they have endured between 40 and 60 uses per day for over 17 years without the need for service or repair, except for rubber hand grips and brake pads for the centrifugal brake on the flywheel. The cost per use on those machines has come down to under 6 cents per use. That is vastly less than for any other equipment in those clubs. The purchase price of the ROM includes 10 year free parts warranty (even for commercial applications and that is unheard of). Five years of free parts right away and then an additional 5 years after ROM owners write us a short account of their experience with the ROM. That letter need not be complimentary, it should just relate the truth. The truth works fine for us.

Since 1990 we have had fewer than 250 occasions of having to send out parts for the over 4600 ROM machines we have sold. That includes in 1995 a series of 35 ROM machines that had a fault in the computer power supply where the LED lights burned out after people had the machines for under 2 years.

WHY MOST PEOPLE CANNOT AFFORD NOT TO BUY A ROM
Everyone who understands the need for exercise as a means to improve and maintain good health and whose time is worth at least 5 dollars per hour can easily understand that 30 to 90 minutes of exercise per day is far more costly in terms of money and time combined than the ROM at $1.45 and 4 minutes per day.

            For most people it is not the savings of time that makes the ROM worth $1.45 per day because many retired people have plenty of time, but they also have plenty of exercise equipment that they do not use because it requires at least 60 minutes per day and they do not have the needed discipline to use that time consuming equipment. So they do not exercise and their health keeps deteriorating at a pace much faster than if they would be exercising. Fact is that 92% of people who own exercise equipment do not use it. For these people the ROM represents the difference between exercising and not exercising at all and spending at least 4 minutes per day on average swallowing medications and making visits to the hospital with ailments they could prevent and/or sharply reduce with exercise. But they do not do exercise because it takes much more than 4 minutes per day.

If I could make a very bitter pill that sells for $10 apiece and would magically give the same effects as from 60 minutes of exercise I would not be able to fill the orders fast enough for orders of 100 pills at a time. Well sorry, no such pill  is available but the ROM is the closest thing to it. But it takes 4 minutes of hard work. Four minutes is a do-able proposition and that is why 85% to 90% of ROM owners use their machines to full advantage (compared to 8% of people who own conventional exercise equipment).

EXPENSE OF TIME
Things you buy and don’t use are very expensive. Things you buy and actually use and they take a lot of time to use and give very little results have the additional expense of time and have relatively little payback in the form of results for time invested.

Conventional home exercise equipment is very expensive in terms of time and 92% of owners of such equipment recognize the fact of the high expense in time and the low return on the time investment.. TIME is the reason why they do not use their home exercise equipment. If they were to think a little further of the health they are losing by not exercising at all they would still be willing to spend the extra time to maintain their health like the 8% of people who are using their home exercise equipment. Over a period of 30 years the money expense of the ROM is $1.45 per day and the time expense is only 4 minutes. For people whose time is worth more than $25 per hour the 4 minutes on the ROM are worth $1.67 and for a lawyer who charges $150 per hour the 4 minutes are worth $12.

COMBINED EXPENSE OF MONEY AND TIME
A ticket from Los Angeles to New York for $49 sounds like a bargain until you are told that it is on Greyhound. The expense of 3 days worth of time is vastly too expensive on Greyhound and therefore of course an airline ticket for $300 is a lot less expensive than the $49 on Greyhound.

NOW WHY DOES THE PURCHASE PRICE OF THE ROM HAVE TO BE SO HIGH?
The marketing cost is the biggest expense in the ROM. There IS NO MARKET FOR A 4 MINUTE EXERCISE MACHINE because anybody in their right mind just knows that a 4 minute workout could not possibly exist. They are absolutely wrong of course, but as long as they do not realize that they are wrong, they will not be interested in a 4 minute exercise machine. If we were to spend the same advertising money to advertise treadmills we would sell about 150 times as many treadmills as we sell ROM machines.

           When finally some people are seriously interested in buying a ROM machine and they have no problem with the price, they would still want to make certain that they are not making a big mistake and they would like to have the advice from an “EXPERT” such as a personal trainer or a doctor. Not to anyone’s surprise these “EXPERTS” will immediately declare that there is no such thing as a 4 minute workout, because if there were such a thing they certainly would know about it, in fact the whole World would know about it. Such is the circle reasoning of most experts in all fields of knowledge. Experts kill a lot of ROM sales leading to low number of sales, leading to low volume manufacturing, leading to high manufacturing and sales cost.

          The first 10.5 years of manufacturing and marketing the ROM we made nothing but losses. I had to subsidize the ROM project with money from our other family business ( www.NordicSauna.com ) and you have to be very stubborn to keep doing anything for 10.5 years, making no wages and having to subsidize it on top of that. Without my stubbornness there would not even be a ROM today. Since the beginning of the year 2001 we finally started making a profit because the referral sales keep growing every year with ever more ROM machines out in the field. It will still take a long time to recover all the money invested and to pay for the many years of making not even wages from the ROM project. Some “very smart” people have several solutions to the marketing problem of the ROM. They say that lowering the price of the ROM would make the ROM more affordable to many more people and create more sales which in turn would make the manufacturing cost lower. This is another example of circle reasoning. Read below.

CIRCLE REASONING OF EXPERTS
Experts are the guardians of the status-quo because they do the following circle reasoning: “If this new insight were true, we would certainly know about it because we are experts, but because we do not know about this new insight it must be false”. As an added strong argument, some of the “experts” may say that if you don’t want to take their word for it, they will gladly give you a list of other experts that will tell you the same thing. Columbus had that same “expert” problem when he tried to raise money for his expedition “AROUND THE EARTH”. The problem was that at his time the Earth was still flat in the minds of people and “experts” alike. When Columbus tried to get his expedition funded at the various Royal Houses in Europe these kings might have said: “Columbus, I love to invest in your exciting idea, but let me first check with my Royal Cartographer to see what he thinks about a round Earth. The expert answer was predictable: “King, save your money. There is no round Earth. If there were such a thing I would know about it and if you do not want to believe me I can give you a whole list of other map makers who will tell you the same thing”. It took Columbus 12 years until he finally found the young and inexperienced royal couple of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain who were willing to throw all caution to the wind by not listening to their court cartographers. They took a leap of faith and were willing to give it a shot. The rest is history. With the ROM it is the same way. People have to give it a shot in the form of renting it for 30 days to try it out. The 30 day rental applies 100% to the purchase and 97% of people that rent the ROM are purchasing it. 

CIRCLE REASONING THAT A LOWER PRICE WILL MAKE MORE PROFIT
If there is a ready market for a particular product then lowering of the purchase price will result in the extra number of sales that will actually increase the net profit. If there is no ready market for a product then lowering the price will not results in enough additional sales to improve net profits. Even with accepted products like for example a 747 Boeing airplane dropping the selling price by 50% would not result in the 10 times as many sales to make the net profit come to the same as it is currently.  So for now if you want to purchase one ROM machine you have to pay $14,615 and larger numbers of sales are subject to the discount/commission schedule as outlined on www.Quickgym.net in the paragraph titled “Sales Commissions”.

If you have additional questions or comments, please email me at 
alf(at)fastexercise.com

Alf Temme

Romfab

Factory showroom:

8137 Lankershim Blvd

North Hollywood, California 91605

Phone: (818) 787-6460

Email:  sales@Fastexercise.com