How many dealers would give me a price for repair over the phone if I called and said 'my tractor won't move"? I doubt many would even have called me back.
TBN tends to have a skewed view of dealers, since every Kioti dealer here is top-notch and very active in this online community. None of the 8 dealers within 100 miles of me is a participant here.
When the problem first occured, I could have called all 8 dealers and told them what the problem was "tractor won't move, makes a loud noise". I could have looked at the shaft, saw it was not turning (again, provided that a dealer would have told me to check). That narrows it down a bit, but still, the extent of the damage wouldn't be known until it was apart. My guess is that all 8 (including Wertz) would quote me something like "well, without seeing it, it could take 2 hours or 20 hours, we'll have to tear it apart to see". So I chose Wertz, they being local and I'd heard good things about them. They were an authorized Kioti dealer and service center, so I assumed some level of confidence in them and from Kioti.
Of course in hindsight, I would have taken it to someone else, but other than the dealers represented here on TBN, I don't know that any of the other dealers wouldn't have done the same thing, and that includes Travis (again, according to Kioti, is irrelevant). Say one dealer said 2 hours, so I take it to him, he tears into it and then comes back "whoa, its really bad, now it looks like 40 hours". Then what? Do I take a trailer and go pick up the pieces and haul them to dealer B bacause he guesstimated less hours? The analogy is bad, but you get my point.
Would Kioti have given me parts under warranty directly? Somehow I doubt it, they would want word from an authorized Kioti dealer to verify. I have a few friends that are Bobcat mechanics that could have done the work for me, heck, I probably could have done it myself for that matter, but would Kioti take my word for it? Again, hindsight is always 20/20.
Again, going back to Honda...there are probably 30 Honda dealers within 25 miles of my house, I can choose any one of them to get authorized Honda service. When I choose Honda authorized service, I place a certain level of trust in both the dealer and the manufacturer. If I feel that there is some issue with the dealer (warranty work or not) I can go to the manufacturer for support in working with that dealer. They all work from the same book so pricing would almost certainly be very close, and I doubt many would have quoted a price over the phone for anything other than parts.
If Kioti is completely "hands-off" after the warranty has ended, and allows dealers to walk all over their customers (keep in mind, these are Kioti customers , not neccesarily dealer customers) then buying decisions need to be made on post warranty support from a manufacturer. Kioti will suffer if they allow authorized dealers to run rampant without a check and balance system in place, both pre- and post- warranty.
Its also been my experience that even if you call a dealer and tell them exactly what is wrong (provided you know exactly what is wrong), they will still do diagnostics. I took my Corolla in for a new muffler...the old one had the mount rusted off and it sounded like a Harley. I told them it needed a new muffler, yet they wrote on the ticket "car makes loud noise, diagnose noise to muffler, R & R muffler"
I doubt Wertz is going to even notice effects from any sort of negative publicity here...I'd venture to say less than 1% of its customers are active in any online tractor site. I certainy won't go back there, for anything, and I certainly wouldn't recommend them to anyone, but that impact is minimal at best.
The sad thing is, I know what I know about this situation due to the knowledge base of TBN, and the help of some very good people on my behalf. Suppose I was just a "normal" consumer and didn't have this basic knowledge....makes you wonder.
