Are lumber prices falling?

I'm seeing that the price of lumber futures is falling. It may be quite some time before that's reflected in the retail price of a 2x4 at Home Despot.

OTOH, I'm not surprised. My kitchen remodel is winding down, so I'm not likely to buy more lumber anytime soon.

Cindy Hamilton

I was thinking of building a birdhouse- except the bank turned down the loan.

You could make it out of bricks.

Price of bricks going up too.

Odd coincidence. I just watched this episode of MythBusters a few hours ago:

Ahh, they could have been talking about futures. If so, I missed it.

That was the metric I saw being used. It may indicate what happens in a few months but Home Depot is still going to sell the lumber in their pipeline based on what they paid for it.

If you owned a business, isn't that what you'd do?

Actually, no. You generally sell for what the market will pay and hope that it's more than what it will cost to replace stock once it's sold. That's why prices on the shelf go up faster than wholesale.

Sticking to a fixed margin over cost is a quick way to go out of business. You are selling for less than the market will pay and thus are leaving money on the table, or you are pricing at more than the market will pay and won't make the sale.

Finally , someone who understands how this works . Too many look at the short term when it's the long haul that really matters . OK , we lost a bundle on that load of 2x4's . We'll make it up on other sales . This is also why so many startups fail . They're doomed from the get-go if they aren't capitalized to work for nothing or at a loss for the first year - or two , depending on the product and market .

"We lose money on every sale but we make it up in volume."

In a way it applies. If the lumber is priced too high compaed to competition, it sits, takes up space and is just a drain. Better to move it and recoup what you can get.

Absolutely. The argument would be, did they raise the price on lumber they bought before the expensive lumber hit their pipeline?

It is like gasoline, Pump prices rise when the spot price of crude goes up, long before they empty the pipe of cheaper product but the price doesn't come down until the pipe is full of cheaper gas.

These days I assume the owners of HD, Lowes and Menards discuss the price of lumber on the golf course and agree on what they will sell it for. That is why "price match" guarantees are not usually worth much.

I think that's illegal and I certainly woudln't assume they do it.

More likely they watch what the other store is charging and if the price changes, they can change their own price in a day, or maybe even an hour. Similar result but I don't think anyone has suggested that should be illegal.

Not a hardware store, but I was somewhere, a supermarket maybe, where they had digital price labels. At the time I thought it was a waste of money by a guy who was gadget crazy, but it means someone can change prices for the whole chain for loads of items per guy-who-does-this in the time it takes to type in prices plus 5 minutes.

It hasn't caught on afaik. Haven't seen it again.

I agre they're not worth much. Some chains like CraZy Eddie got/get the manufacturer to give special model numbers to their stores, so they never bump into the same model inthe first place.

You never saw the bar code on a product? That is how they price items and changing it is a few keystrokes on the managers PC in the office or it can be done from corporate HQ. That was one of the main things that drove the computerized checkout in the early 70s. They may get around to changing the shelf label but I doubt most people notice when it is wrong by a few cents. If you catch them they will honor the shelf tag price but be ready to hold up the line while they go and check it.

Most big chains have the same thing on appliances so you can't compare apples to apples. It might be as simple as adding a single letter or number on to an appliance model.

State law prevails. If there is an error in CT you get the item free. I enjoyed a $9 pizza from the grocery store that way.

I've seen many instances - InSinkErator is a great example - where it's not just a slight difference in part number, but the names are different between the Home Centers, even though the specs are the same.

If you compare the specs for the Home Depot Evolution Compact vs the Lowes Evolution SpaceSaver, it's the same disposal, other than the name on the metal band and the color.

Home Depot: Evolution Compact 3/4 HP Continuous Feed Garbage Disposal