If they did they might have a clue, and if they had a clue they wouldn't have done what they've just done and I wouldn't have posted. So like a time-traveller paradox: go back and kill your parents and so you never existed so you couldn't go back in time to ... :-)
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I went to ours today. They even had "Forge" tools (Screwfix own-brand). The counter droid pointed out that they were the same company, and suggested that the reason for the duplication of outlets was that trade bods could get their kit at B&Q without being held up by the punters who clog up the Screwfix trade counters. Duh? If they're going to get interchangeable about outlets (and carry Screwfix stock in B&Q) why not simply have a punter-facing Screwfix in-store with a separate trade-only counter (rather as B&Q wharehouse has been doing for years anyway)? B&Q has vastly more parking space, they'd only need to maintain one premises and stock inventory (but with some more bods to serve the traders), and for the punters the Missus can be off round the garden centre bit or soft furnishings or whatever they do[1] while Mr DIY carefully selects his box of 200 Goldscrews and counts them to make sure they're all there at the Screwfix bit.
Mind you, the lower trade price on all B&Q stock was nice :-)
[1] ducks! ;-)Tsk, you don't get it.
You have to double your cost structure via costly business rate retail premises, you watch the share price go down the toilet, then to demonstrate your true faith in the company you buy shares, the City demand change which is essentially cost cutting by reduction in headcount & retail outlets not meeting headline targets of area managers, you have a kitchen sink quarter with an extraordinary writedown and reduce costs, at which point the share price rises & insiders unload.
More seriously, I have a horrible feeling that Kingfisher is operating B&Q & Screwfix as competitors.
Screwfix do not know whether to be trade or retail. Being trade only inherently limits your growth capability & trade declines in a recession. Conversely DIY provides much higher footfall growth potential & DIY rises in a recession as peoples cost appetite changes from "move" to "refurb". Trade tends to require credit if the job is staged payment, but many wholesalers got shafted by over extending credit lines & allowing delinquences to rise. DIY conversely doesn't involve credit, which can smooth a troubled credit exposure - alternatively offering credit can dilute credit exposure re ratios.
B&Q similarly trying trade is ridiculous. It only a little more footfall compared to the mostly retail customer base, but in doing so they end up with overlapping markets, overlapping brands and overlapping customer base to poach customers by price competition from another income statement. It is worse than the Chrysler-Mercedes tie up which rather than reduce per vehicle cost simply reduced per vehicle quality & per vehicle profit.
Amusingly I suspect marketing are running the two companies in competition, setting bonus rates on growth, and congratulating themselves on their achievement whilst the consolidated income statement gets shafted. Sort of like idiot social services with a dead baby saying "look at the charts, we have met all our targets". Or NHS management, I remember the introduction of Kaplans Balanced Scorecard
- the problem was management were too dumb to fill in what to measure and got it wrong, a whole pile of "fieldbooks" & "consultancy" were required, then they merely wrote it based around commission rather than strategic objectives. Like GPs given bonuses for checking the patient isn't dead (quite yet).
DIY may keep them both afloat, but personally I see two huge business rate costs & two overlapping brands to the extent that some are physically back-to-back. It looks like a merger which has yet to have "we'll eliminate any with geographical overlap". I am not sure having both will help volume sufficiently to reduce costs, although that may explain why a lot of the specialist screwfix range has begun to vanish as someone takes the knife to inventory cost and tries to pool buying.
Two brands under the same company can work and were used in the 1990s in IT retailing, the problem eventually becomes one of overlap and they basically compete for the same customer driving up customer acquisition costs without revenue. It's not that you know 40 ways to make love, it's that you know which one the customer wants. Hard for a "hardware store" to lose focus, but it could lose product mix & price. Focus did a brilliant job on the former, and Homebase seems to believe M&S pricing on some remarkably crap products in a huge warehouse works.
Kingfisher probably require each of their own businesses to survive and compete in it's own right. Telling one it can't open near to another one in a different business group just means someone else will, so Kingfisher loses out. That's not to say they might not use their combined buying power to better effect (although I've no idea if they do).
I don't think trade or retail means anything nowadays.
Once upon a time, there were trade-only outlets which supplied trade customers with items at a lower price than retail outlets. However, retail customers are now much more price sensitive than most tradesmen, and the ease with which you can search for products across the Internet means that the price difference has gone, and many items can be found cheaper on the Internet than a trademan is going to pay at a trade counter.
Very few businesses nowadays can afford to turn down any orders, so saying to someone that they can't buy something because they're the wrong type of customer makes no sense. Furthermore, trade accounts cost trade outlets interest on outstanding depts, usually much more than retail cash/card purchases cost them, which is another reason not to turn your nose up to them.
Given that competing companies are quite happy to operate (often illegal) non-competition agreements when it benefits them all overall, it seems daft for subdivisions of the same commercial organisations not to do the same. Which is not to say that they're not daft enough not to :-)
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