"TURTLE" writes:
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.

This is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard, more
reminiscent of the old Soviet system than the current Internet-enabled
world with ever more transparent and competitive pricing.

Why would the contractor care (other than indirectly) if I saved a
couple of dollars on a project that I am going to do myself anyway,
particularly if I could always get the items at the same or better
pricing on the Internet or maybe even at Home Depot?

In fact, I would turn your argument on its face -- if a contractor is
getting good service, selection, and pricing at his/her current
supplier, why would he ever consider risking pricing and service on
$500,000 of spend just because I saved a couple of dimes on some
switch or a couple of bucks on some fixture.

Globalization, the Internet, and increasing competition are changing
the face of business forever, making pricing more competitive and
transparent than ever before. Now that pricing can be looked up and
compared on the Internet, it is a lot harder for suppliers to price
discriminate between retail and wholesale customers except on the
basis of true volume efficiencies (e.g., buying pallets or cases) or
when the purchaser has dominant purchasing power (think Walmart). The
differential between wholesale and retail pricing erodes as big box
retailers push down the retail price while Internet-suppliers (and
others) allow individuals access to contractor-like pricing.
Those who can't adapt to this reality are not going to survive.

Nothing is free in this world !

Each supplier is free to decide what discount is required to maximize
its profit (volume x margin). If a supplier believes that selling to
enough people like me at a discount brings them more profit and
prevents me from going to the Home Center or Internet then by all
means they should sell to me at or near the contractor discount. If
they believe that they need to give you more of a discount to retain
your business or that you are cheaper to serve due to your volume then
maybe you will get a bigger discount. However, in this day of
multi-billion dollar purchasers (like Walmart), your power as a volume
buyer is a lot closer to my thousands of dollars a year than to Home
Depot or Walmart's purchasing power.

Finally, from a "moral" viewpoint, I have always thought it to be
borderline sleazy that contractors make an additional *hidden* margin
by marking up the price of materials. I am happy to pay a fair and
competitive hourly labor rate and to pay a delivery charge on
materials, but I fail to see why a contractor should make an
additional hidden profit by marking up materials due to the old "cozy"
relationship between suppliers and contractors. I now use the Internet
all the time to challenge contractors on marked-up materials pricing
thereby avoiding being gouged and getting a better sense of my labor
vs. materials cost. In fact, this is no different from the uproar over
hospitals marking up the price of Tylenol (beyond the cost of goods
and administration) or government contractors marking up the cost of
toilet seats.

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.

Sounds like you have a case of bitterness here. If I can get
contractor-like pricing without doing the above than all the power to
me. Since you weren't going to get that business from me anyway, it
doesn't really hurt you, except perhaps your ego that some "layman"
like me is getting competitive pricing without belonging to the
"guild".



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

That is of course another tried-and-true alternative