Marinas That Won"t Reserve Space

[Trojan]

We have brand new docks on one side the river and old docks on the other in Toledo O and no place to go when you get there, unless you call a cab. Toledo O promotes zero for the boating group. Nothing. Except the forth of July. City council is boater dead. They will be worse off this summer with the cutbacks. The waterfront restaurants 6 of them, are charging you to dock and there prices to eat are way over priced. The off shore restaurants are sitting on a gold mine and are to stupid to do anything about it. I mentioned taxi service from the docks to a restaurant and the owner though it was a good idea and that was as far as it went. Any port in Michigan and Canada has this service. What is wrong?

BILL

[Genesis]

Clearwater won't take reservations BUT the times I've been there I've really liked the facilities.

The other side of that is that they will not kick you out when your time expires. This works to your advantage once there if the weather doesn't cooperate and you get socked in. They're a popular jumping point for the transit to Appalachicola and we got socked in there for a week once - it was a nice place to wait it out.....

[Brian Degulis]

Hi Karl Yeah it's a really nice place but it's very hard to use cause you can't plan a trip and know you will have a spot. In the summer there are usually lots of open slips you would think if they would start taking reservations they would fill them up.

Brian

[Boatsb]

Welcome to the new world. No service is safe from being cut back. Reservations would require some thought and planning. Outback restaurants and many of the Darden ones too will not take reservations because it is too much for their people to handle. My response was to hire smarter and better trained people but they said the budget would not allow it.

Welcome to the WalMart era. Nothing is safe from cutting back as long as it goes to the bottom line. Service will be dead unless we demand it. What a great way to loose business in such a lousy economy.

[krush]

The pendulum always swings back and smart entrepreneurs will make money and provide service. That's the beauty of capitalism.

[Boatsb]

As the economy changes and the lower income families multiply the pendulum gets smaller and has less mass eventually becoming so small that there is not enough to swing it back to where it needs to be.

Look at the stats for "middle income" families and see their numbers are dwindling. Now with the higher end incomes threatened and fuel prices rising the whole economy is moving towards lower cost less service. Once the services are gone they are like an animal that has gone almost to extinction and may never be able to grow to a level that it can sustain itself without help.

[krush]

I believe your "lower income" rant is driven by the fact that America has had cheap/free credit for the past 15 years.

Story: My one proffessor the other week said "You guys all have too nice of cars for college students". A quick ponder and I realized he was exactly right. Now, I drive a 1992 s10 blazer that I just "upgraded" to last year ($900 at state auction, 80,000 miles, 4wd, 4.3 power window/locks), but many kids have new or newer cars. The number of BMW's and stuff is disgusting!

14 years ago both my brothers didn't have cars in college. Their friend that did drove CLUNKERS. Now almost ever college kid has a nice car along with plenty of debt (credit cards and student loans). This easy credit didn't exist 15-20 years ago.

Fake money is why we are seeing all these problems. Don't worry, the days of fake money are OVER--just check out the economy.

[Boatsb]

No the opposite. Too many non college educated not making money kinds of people being the lower income ones.

[krush]

No the opposite. Too many non college educated not making money kinds of people being the lower income ones.

I suggest you step foot into some universities sometime. Way TOO MANY people are going to college. It has just become an extension of high school. People are getting USELESS degrees such as "Property Management" in which classes consist of "kitchen labs" to teach people how to use appliances (most would call this home-ec). There is also "housing, apparel, and resource management" and then the good old "managment" major.

Due to easy credit, people pay top dollar for these usless pieces of paper. Some kids spend 150-200k on a 4 year education in "communications" (I had a friend do this) and after graduation make 25-30k a year.

The parent's reasoning? "I can't put a price on my child's education"...HAHAHA, I sure as hell can and WILL when I have kids.

[SKYCHENEY]

I believe your "lower income" rant is driven by the fact that America has had cheap/free credit for the past 15 years.

Story: My one proffessor the other week said "You guys all have too nice of cars for college students". A quick ponder and I realized he was exactly right. Now, I drive a 1992 s10 blazer that I just "upgraded" to last year ($900 at state auction, 80,000 miles, 4wd, 4.3 power window/locks), but many kids have new or newer cars. The number of BMW's and stuff is disgusting!

14 years ago both my brothers didn't have cars in college. Their friend that did drove CLUNKERS. Now almost ever college kid has a nice car along with plenty of debt (credit cards and student loans). This easy credit didn't exist 15-20 years ago.

Fake money is why we are seeing all these problems. Don't worry, the days of fake money are OVER--just check out the economy.

Maybe I'm out of touch with the college crowd, but 20 years ago when I was there, credit was easy to come by as well. Every credit card company considered a "future college graduate" to be a good risk. We had the same tables set up with free T-shirts, etc, just for filling out an application. And as far as cars, most of us had cars. I went to a campus that had a "no car" rule. What that meant was that everybody that wanted to have one just didn't live on campus. We lived in frat houses and apartments. The new beamers and such were evident back then too.

Don't count out this economy yet. We have weathered similar storms in the past. This is nothing like the stagflation days of the late 70s/early 80's and I doubt it will get that bad again.

Back to the subject at hand, I hate those no reservations places. We have a nice state marina system here in Michigan, but only about 1/3 of them accept reservations. I don't understand why the state doesn't expand this to include all of their marinas. They do it for all of the state parks, why not all of the marinas?