B&Q Culverhouse Cross £1.78 B&Q Bridgend £2.18 Jewsons Bridgend £3.63 Wickes Bridgend £1.99
I was seriously cheesed off after loading 40 onto a trolley before noticing the price at B&Q Bridgend I just left the trolley, drove to Culverhouse Cross and saved £16
Will B+Q price match themselves? With the 10% price beater, you'd get it from Bridgend for =A31.60 then!
A
Is it all the same quality, though? Last time I looked at this size in Wicks it was all about as straight as the average politician...
As with most of the sheds, the problem is that they take in a delivery of (say) 100 lengths of CLS, but (say) 10% are banana-shaped. So nobody buys them. When there are only (say) 25 lengths left, they get another
100 delivered, again with 10% knackered. These add to the 10 already there, so we now have 20 unusable lengths. Next time there's a delivery, we'll end up with 30 rubbish lengths left on display, etc etc- which means that unless someone buys bent stuff, the stock levels won't go down low enough to trigger a new delivery.
Until someone with enough nous goes and clears out the unsellable rubbish and starts again...
David
Is Culverhouse Cross one of the B&Q Warehouse stores? I've noticed their prices do seem lower than the ordinary B&Q stores. No surprises at the Jewsons price - why does anyone buy from them?
yes, it's a fair bit bigger than Bridgend and always cheaper IME
Who said anything about paying list?
because they're trade suppliers, with free delivery, and the higher the price the greater the ££ profit on an x% mark-up to the customer.
And, as Mr Hall says, who pays list?
Owain
So what sort of discount can you get from Jewsons? In the above example it should be 51% approx to equal B&Q's best.
If they are in the habit of marking up stuff by 100% in order to offer a 'trade discount' of 50% then they are a bunch of cowboys living in the distant past. The world don't work like that anymore.
It's called negotiation and needs to be done in the appropriate way and at the appropriate level.
I actually did quite well with them on one project by going with a materials list to several timber and builders merchants and telling them that they were being asked for pricing along with other suppliers. I also told them that I was expecting good quality materials and that any crap would be returned. The overall spend was in the region of £1k5. Among the trade merchants, they weren't the least expensive
- there was one lower - but I wasn't satisfied that the cheapest would deliver good product.
I also did a sanity check against B&Q and they could have supplied about 80% of the materials wanted. On that 80%, they were 25% more expensive than Jewsons. The materials were of good quality and were delivered on the days agreed without problems.
Following that, one of the area business development managers contacted me wanting me to set up an account. I'm not really interested in a monthly credit account but did let them set up a cash one.
There is also a Travis Perkins sawmill place close to me. Normally I wouldn't use TP for anything much at all, but this place has a good turnover in constructional timber and delivers good quality materials - at least it does now after the first delivery that they attempted that I rejected. We had a "conversation" after that one.
In a different trade, I have done quite well with WF Electrical as a supplier, again beginning with a project quote.
So I think it really depends on scenario. If one wants to buy materials piecemeal here and there then places like B&Q serve a purpose as long as one doesn't mind wasting half an hour each time sorting through the timber and setting the rubbish to one side. One can also get a variety of different goods under one roof, so I can see that it's interesting to be able to do that under some circumstances.
The trade suppliers aren't really looking for that type of business, by and large and price accordingly.
In my case I wanted that size of CLS but didn't need the complete lengths, as it were, so after a bit of negotiation got what I needed but only actually paid for the straight parts of the timber. So did my bit for clearing out the dross. IIRC, they were approx 3 metre lengths with the end couple of feet only bent, and I got three for the price of one, so quite a good deal.
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