They are a builder's merchant, essentially a wholesaler that will
*tolerate* selling to non trade Cash paying individuals. If you are looking for *attendants* to serve you with WYSIWYG pricing try B&Q. One less P*&^* in the queue.-
Depends on if you are posting a letter bomb or not I suppose. ;-)
Interesting what message they are trying to send.... were you supposed to down the stella before of after using the meter?
Precisely why I don't buy from places like that.
Which is why I prefer Wickes. If an item is priced @ £20 I have the choice to buy it or not. I simply can't be arsed to barter for everything I buy.
If I think £20 is OTT for the item I can shop around.
Why would anyone bother buying from a company having what is essentially a policy of 'try & tuck them up, unless they argue the price'?
I avoid Jewsons & TP like the plague.
It's a form of business.
In effect Wickes' policy is "we can tuck them up because we know they won't argue the price".
Having said that, I can appreciate that in your business procurement time can have a large cost and more to the point, you probably don't know in a lot of cases what you will need until you look at the job. Given all of that, I can see the appeal of a one stop shop.
Fair point. I'm in Wickes or B&Q almost daily with an average spend of about £35 a visit. I like Wickes especially because of the type of product they stock, the fairly consistant quality & the availability.
If deck building I always go to Bats Timber in Strood because of the higher quality & lower price - but then my average spend is something like £700, so it makes sense to shop around. £700 spent at Bats would be £950 spent at Wickes, or £1100 at BQ - the latter being such poor quality & range as to make it unviable.
Had a recent experience where a friend ordered six sheets of toughened glass. He measured carefully, gave them the size in metric and imperial, and pointed out they must be ready for Wednesday next week at the latest.
Come Tuesday, still no glass. Phoned the supplier, who said, oh sorry we have not done it yet, because the measurements you gave were not the same, and we did not know what size to cut it! Upon further enquiry it turns out that if you use enough decimal places on your conversion there was a 1mm difference in the measurements on the long side (these were approx 1500 x 500mm sheets). Needless to say pointing out to them that they were discussing glazing and not high tolerance engineering, so 1mm made no difference one way or the other did not seem to help.
(to be fair it would have helped if my friend had made sure they had a working phone number to ring him on!)
Another point to bear in mind with BMs is that they are to an extent wholesale operations, so their pricing needs to be flexible by the nature of the business. The flexibility is usually tied to purchase volume, bigger volumes mean more bulk discounts (not only for you, but for them from their suppliers[1]). If you were routinely sticking £900 quid orders into a local BM, then chances are you would find the pricing far more competitive without any need to haggle. The fact that you can push them down on price with small volume orders is probably more of a marketing gambit from their perspective - i.e. it might encourage you to go back with bigger orders. This is one of the advantage of opening cash accounts - they know you are more likely to come back, and so from a business perspective it is easier to view your £35 transaction as part of a larger "whole" than just a one off transaction.
[1] Don't know why I bother mentioning it, since you worked in commercial sales and no doubt know this far better than me already!
Worst place I ever found was some timber place in Strood (but not Bats, as I recall).
Whether the average person on the counter thinks in terms of marketing gambits, I'm not sure, but nonetheless....
It can be by product line as well. For example, a few years back I bought quite a lot of MK stuff for a kitchen and conservatory project. This was special ordered through WF because the items were not wholesale stock and some were built to order. At any rate, the discount level provided was very keen indeed. This discount was applied to the account and now, every time I buy MK stuff, even small quantities, the same applies.
Jewson is the UK's leading supplier of timber and building roducts to the trade and *general public*" (my emphasis).
So you've taken your own advice then?
MBQ
If my experience is typical, I'm surprised anyone goes back to become a regular. Screwfix have opened just over the road so maybe that will give the Aylesbury branch a kick up the arse.
MBQ
That's fanciful.
All of the building and most related distributors are after every piece of business that they can get as far as their management and marketing are concerned.
Some of the dweebs in the branches may still labour under the notion that because they are a "trade" outlet they are doing anybody else a favour by serving them - they perhaps get off on the implied "power" that it gives them. It's certainly not company policy.
It really doesn't because customers simply go elsewhere and they lose what could be higher than normal margin business. Of course, they aren't bright enough to work that one out.
The only other difference is that some may try to sell to customers on commercial as opposed to consumer terms and conditions. OTOH, I've never had issues with returning defective products to merchants.
They don't have them either. From a service perspective, the supermarkets are worse.
Ring any BM or timber merchant and ask how much anything is, I guarantee the response will be how many/much are you after, they are wholesalers First and foremost. And also one of the few places were political correctness has not been discovered, you can haggle over the discount and have some friendly banter with the yardmen (or are they now called attendants) whilst they help you load your order.
-
Obviously. The answer is irrelevant because that's just the first asking price. The more important issue at that stage is whether or not they have stock.
Always a good thing.
Being pleasant to people usually produces positive results.
Let us assume that you need to visit a bricks and mortar bank. I imagine you have done no such think for longer than most of us have been alive, but humour me, and assume the situation arises. Would you seriously expect a bank branch to open five minutes after they have closed, just to accommodate you?
The PO, or PO staff?
This is a real stretch. I have done that once in the last three years, and that was for an appointment with my bank manager. Subsequently, these have been meetings in the pub.
No, but I would expect them to be accomodating - e.g. out of town location, with car parking and open until 20:00.
Certainly not closing for lunch.
Both.
This particular wholesaler is lowering it's standards. A pool table and table football machine are now also in place. I do not object to the new Dyson hand dryer in the toilets though. It is a fantastic machine.
Adam
That would have been Morgans Timber I bet.
Indeed - so why would you expect a PO to be any different, regarding security. Surely you are not naive enough to imagine that there is any difference in 'value' to a thief?
Qualification is irrelevant - 'no' is a perfectly acceptable answer.
My office does not close for lunch.
Explain, please.
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