The fact of the matter is, there are a number of us who read letters like this:
***********
3-29-14
A letter to the membership director of the scout 101 club.
Hello Jeff. I don't know if you are aware of what the new Indian / Polaris company is doing. Through their law firm they are going after long established Indian suppliers that specialize in the vintage Indians built till 1953. After wasting thousands of dollars on lawyers, some suppliers have already paid for "licensing agreements" that also include a percentage of sales going to I / P (Indian Polaris).
One long time Indian supplier on the east coast has now closed his business because he couldn't afford this "licensing agreement". He had a great product that was made in the USA. The alternate now is an inferior product made in China. On a recent order of vintage Indian parts I noticed prices on some items had increased 10-20%. The supplier mentioned because of the I / P agreement, costs have gone up and the only way to recoup his new added expenses is to pass it on to his customers.
The new Indian company have been hyping their new bikes on heritage, using old bikes in ads and even copying the Munro streamliner. And now they want to screw the owners and riders of the original Indians. If it wasn't for us the name would be worthless. Don't they realize that we are their best "free" advertising?
I am in contact with a lot of people in the
Indian motorcycle community - and they are very upset. I tried to get in touch with someone at Indian. Their 800 numbers direct you to Polaris where no one can give you any contact phone or email to anyone at Indian. Very strange. I finally found a phone # for their media relations person (Robert) but it was discontinued. I did email and he did reply. After a long phone call the bottom line was "they own the Indian name and me and everyone else is going to pay". Not a pleasant person to talk to. On a You Tube video I discovered the person in charge of Indian was a Steve Menneto.
I asked to talk with him and he said Steve was a very busy guy. He would not give me Steve's # or email. Very frustrating - like dealing with the government. I did some checking on Polaris. This is what I found at Bloomberg. They did nearly $4 billion in sales last year with a net profit of $381 million. Their CEO Scott Wine had a salary package of $31 million in 2012. Many other Polaris executives were not far behind. Scott joined Polaris in 2008 as their new CEO. He was brought in to do some cost savings.
His main cost saving was closing their Osceola, Wisconsin plant and moving it to Monterrey, Mexico costing 500 people their jobs. They will be opening a new plant in Poland this year and India soon. And this is a company portraying an USA image. While the Fat Cats get richer, Americans lose their jobs to cheap wages in foreign countries.
This seems immoral to me.
One word describes all this - GREED! Robert at Indian said I'll have to pay. He is wrong. I will never buy any product produced by Polaris. Also any Indian parts that are affected by I / P I will not buy. This company will not see one penny of my hard earned money again.
I hope the thousands of Indian riders all over the world do the same.
Don - Please pass this on.
********
And we suddenly realize that we folks who supported and stood by Polaris's motorcycles may very well, once again, have to take it up the back side when we need parts in the future - sort of leaves some folks with the feeling they are being boxed in.
IMHO, there are definitely two schools of thought on where all this is headed.. If you read one of the OP's post from back in January in response to the Vic closure it is clear that, for some reason - it is very difficult for this person to acknowledge the REAL Polaris:
He wrote:
**********
Polaris did things with Vic that no one else did or dared to do in 18 years. People don't realize the cost of R & D and the limitations of departmental budgets. Vic was a small part of Polaris but yet they stepped out on a limb by getting into the American made V-Twin market to begin with. I live close to Roseau, MN the original home of Polaris where the snowmobiles and ATV's are still built and know many people there. I used to work for Arctic Cat which is right next door to Polaris in this rural neighborhood. I traveled with Team Arctic race support and the marketing team during the snowmobile shootout's with the magazine publishers every year with the new lineup. You get to know a lot of folks and make lifelong friends across the manufacturers and hear plenty. When Polaris started the Victory venture the reaction across the board was basically, WTF! Are they nut's??? It wasn't an easy sell to the board to begin with.
It took off and gained approval in the first full production year with getting the award for best cruiser of the year so now it's legit. Then they develop the Freedom engine for the 02 model year just 5 years after the beginning of Vic production. That takes time and lots of money to develop, test, release and tool for production. A complete makeover right after it's birth. Expenses galore. What a lot of people don't realize it that even though the motorcycle plant is in Spirit Lake Iowa, a lot of the fabrication for all of Polaris's vehicles is still in Roseau at the snowmobile/ATV plant headed up by Randy Larson. One of his top fabricators happens to be my neighbor at the lake so I hear plenty but he can only say so much. These people sign a stack of non-disclosure forms to work in these departments promising to keep a lid on it lest they be fired.
**********
Noticing no where in that acknowledgement of Polaris's esteemed accomplishment of designing and bringing to market the Victory motorcycles did the OP point out this fact (from Wiki);
""The 1999 and 2000 Victory models experienced
serious transmission problems, even with bikes with considerably less than 10,000 miles. This has been corrected with minor revisions in 2001 and a complete redesign in 2002. But, according to Wikipedia, Polaris was aware of the problem with the false neutral transmission from the beginning, and yet -
Polaris did not correct the transmissions in the 1999 and 2000 models and to date has not supported the owners of those bikes by replacing an apparently faulty design."""
and, it appears, maybe even chose to cover up those facts for some reason. He admittedly worked arm and arm with folks from Polaris during those days leaving no doubt that he fully knew about the disastor of those early years.
Because of modern day social media, it is getting harder and harder to hide truth from people who want to find it. Living behind rose colored glasses (if that what that is) is an old school way of self preservation and most of us dont wrong people for doing so if it gets them thru life and makes them happy. On the same token though, those of us who want the truth and want to know what reality really is feel like we should be afforded the same elbow room to aquire the knowledge/truth we seek and respond accordinly. Respect is a 2 way street, again, IMHO..