A wise man once said to me, if you competition wants to give away radios - let em.
A small radio shop cannot compete with a large shop or with a mass merchantdiser - the internet. The only thing you can control is the cost of your labor.
If your competition gives away radios long enough, at some point, they will no longer be your competition.
Your employer was penny wise and dollar foolish.
That type of radio will never replace what you are mothballing and in a couple of years, you will be looking for new batteries for the Motorola’s and wishing that you never wasted your money on the Chinese ****.
Tell your boss to send those pieces of **** back and to buy new batteries and forget about trying to program these new radios.
The man in the two way radio shop isn’t trying to rip you off.
He has over head - along with the need to feed his family and pay his bills - just like you and me!
If he gets the batteries for $65.00 American and sells them for $75.00 - he isn’t making much, if anything after taxes!
Buying a new $49.00 Chinese radio, doesn’t solve the problem in the long term, it just masks the problem.
You might wonder why I say this or why I even bother to waste my time sticking my neck out like this.
I have seen this in the radio buisness before.
Even the CB radio went through this phase.
The first units made in the USA were real quality.
Then around 1972 the Japanese came out with the cheap Cobra type **** and the quality manufacturers couldn’t compete and all went out of buisness or did other things. Once the competition was run out of buisness, there was no reason to make anything of any quality and the quality was replaced by flashing colored lights and chrome, a deletion of a power meter and a good microphone and cheapening it to the point of where it wasn’t worth buying anymore.
Eventually Motorola, Vertex, Icom, Johnson will stop investing money in improvements and upgrades and will go into protection mode and eventually they will stop making handhelds because they cannot compete with a lesser quality product. When the market is driven by price and not be quality, the quality will always suffer.
The cell phones just keeps getting better and better, and smaller and smaller, while the two way radio market becomes stagnant.
The technology is being put into the batteries and the antenna’s right now.
The manufacturer is making a more durable product, smaller and more complex to work on.
It eventually drives the two way radio shop right out of buisness.