Chris B wrote:
But these days its not "shopping around" its one google search.

But also bear in mind that random suppliers returned by that Google search
may or may not be reliable, may send the items by Hermes who fling it into a
hedge, etc. Getting everything on one delivery / one trip saves a lot of
hassle.

For example, there's a lot of merit to one-stop-shop suppliers like Farnell
- they aren't cheapest, but when your BOM is a hundred lines long it gets a
lot of hassle to try to source every part from a different supplier. You
could make one order per job, and have all the bits arrive next day in the
same box.

The tradesman needs to buy everything he uses quickly and simply
from just one or two suppliers, he can't spend his time searching
for the best price on the internet - time is money

That is a fair point, and as someone else said I have the opportunity to
spend half a day looking for the best price. In practice however these
days with google it takes but seconds to get the best price.

I suffered the opposite of this when I had a 30 year old car. I'd take it
to a garage to get say the brake pads changed. Tap,tap,tap (or in the more
basic places, ringing round their suppliers), I'm sorry we can't find the
parts. But the parts were readily available on ebay for pennies, from
decent brands just NOS that had sat on a shelf for a while (probably out of
production).

It was often an uphill struggle to convince them to let me supply my own
parts - they would complain they wouldn't get the markup on the parts. To
which my response was: fine, just quote me a price including whatever markup
you would have made. I didn't mind paying extra for that - because even if
they could buy the part for £50 and mark it up to £100, paying them £50 plus
the £10 ebay price was still a win from my point of view. Many didn't see
it that way.

(there's a risk with user-supplied parts that they don't fit, but again
that's my risk not theirs - I should still pay for their time either way.
And I spent more time staring at the parts catalogue making sure they fit
than they would ever have done)

Theo