Festool Price Increase?

[Rob Wright]

I stopped into the local Woodcraft today to check out the Festool CT22 and Fein vac's, (and another look at the domino:D) and the sales people were re-pricing all of the Festool tools! They said that the only price that was going down was the RAS 115 (I think) I was very surprised to hear this. Does anyone else know if this is true? I don't want to start any rumors - just trying to find out if this is really happening! Thanks - Rob

[Doug Shepard]

Sadly it's true. I picked up a few accesories a couple of weeks ago on stuff I otherwise would have waited on just to avoid the price hike.

[Dan Clark]

In some cases it's no increase or only a few percent. In other cases (like the boom arm) it's a pretty serious price increase.

For example, the boom arm is going up from $159 to $225 and the 3000mm guide rail from $227 to $250. The OF1400 router went up $10 to $405 and the CT22 Dust Extractor went up $25. OTOH, all of the C12 drills stayed the same price.

It would be easy to say that Festool is greedy. Unfortunately, much of the driving force is the declining dollar. The dollar has declined about 9-10% in the last 18 months, while the Euro has increased by roughly the same amount.

So, for the same US unit sales, if the Festool price increase averages 9-10%, their US revenue in Euros doesn't change at all!

Regards,

Dan.

p.s., if you take the long view, you'll see that it's worse. The US Dollar index nas DECREASED from 121 in 2001 to 82.5 today and is on a downswing. At the same time, the Euro index has INCREASED from about 84 in the year 2001 to 135 today and it's on an upswing.

[Brice Burrell]

http://www.mcfeelys.com/festool/ They show how much every thing is going up.
This is the last day, April 1st the news prices on online.

[Steve Roxberg]

The boom arm did go up a ton and I picked one up for that reason. The increase on it would have priced it out of my league.

[Brian Gumpper]

The boom arm did go up a ton and I picked one up for that reason. The increase on it would have priced it out of my league.

Wish I knew, I would have picked one up too.

I'm sure Festool USA acts as a master distributor and therefore buys the tools from Germany. As crazy as price increases would seem for overpriced tools, who knows what margin Festool USA works off of. As a whole, Festool is raking it in.

[Rob Blaustein]

The boom arm did go up a ton and I picked one up for that reason. The increase on it would have priced it out of my league.

Me too. Yikes, after the increase, the boom arm plus handle is almost as much as the vac. OK, not quite, but I'm glad I took the plunge yesterday.

[Bill Esposito]

Anyone interested in Festool should ocassionally visit the Festool Owners Group site for the latest poop, mose of us have been stocking up for the last month in anticipation :)