"___ Bob ___" wrote in message ...
Went to the WOODWORKS 2003 show in Nashville Saturday .. .. .. spoke
with a lady from WOODCRAFT who offered me a catalog and a coupon good
during their Grand Opening .. .. .. I half jokingly declined, saying I
was still mad at WOODCRAFT for the clamp fiasco. She said if many more
folks hold out because of that, their Grand Opening might well be a
bankruptcy sale. Seems there were a lot of folks showing up for the
sale and leaving empty handed. She said each store was allotted 40
clamps in each of 3 sizes or 120 total. There are 70+ stores in the
country. That comes to 8400 clamps out in the field. If WOODCRAFT
bought 15,000 clamps total, that left 6,600 clamps in stock for the
midnight madness online sale. Assuming at least SOME were set aside
for employees and "special;" friends, there were probably less than
6,000 available for sale online. At 12/customer, that left enough for
500 orders, or approximately 10 per state. I still think they under
ordered by a tremendous margin.

Woodcraft employees weren't allowed to buy them (at least the ones in
the retail stores). My father-in-law works in such a store, and could
not buy any for himself.

The stock that they had in the store lasted until Saturday afternoon.
I stopped by Friday afternoon and picked up 6 clamps for myself, and
they still had a pretty good stack of them left over.

It kinda sucks that everybody who wanted them couldn't get them, but
has anybody considered the possibility that Jorgensen may not have
allowed Woodcraft to buy as many as they wanted? It sounds like
Jorgensen made no money on the added production necessary to make all
of these things, so I'd expect that they limited retailers to a
certain number of clamps (to prevent them from stocking up and
screwing Jorgensen out of future profitable sales).