"Jeffrey J. Kosowsky" wrote in message
...
Now that the Internet has made pricing so transparent, it gets even
more frustrating to walk into a local supply house and realize that
you are not getting the same deal that contractors get.

- Any tricks on how best to get "contractor discounts" from the local
suppy house?

- How big are the discounts typically to their parallel off-the-street
retail (not list) price?

- Is the discount typically the same for plumbing vs. electrical
vs. building materials vs. gardening/landscaping, etc.?

- What about for "finished" fixtures (e.g., lamps, fawcetts,
cabinets) vs. basic materials (e.g., wire, pipe, lumber)?

This is Turtle.

What your asking here is how to get a contractor's discount on product and not
be a contractor. First let me tell you a little secret here. If you get a
wholesale warehouse to sell to you as a customer / John Q. Public at
contractor's rates and the other contractors find out about it. Your going to
cost that warehouse about a 100 times in lost sales to real contractor that they
would ever hope to sell to you. If they sold you say $500.00 of wholesale goods
they would loose about $50,000.00 to $500,000.00 worth of equipment that the
contractor would have bought without knowing about the sale to you. The
Wholesale suppliers would have to be water headed to sell to you with that big
of a lost they are looking at.

Nothing is free in this world ! Go get you a contractor licences, Contractor
Liability insurance, and a Sales tax number and start buying wholesale. You can
then brag about being a wholesale buyer and everybody will be happy. I buy maybe
$300K of wholesale goods in my HVAC business a year and get a pretty good
discount. If you could buy say $10K of good from them a year. They would give
you pretty close to my discount on goods. The more you buy the more the discount
grows.

The only other choice it to suck up to a contractor and let you buy off his
account for a discount.

TURTLE