from a distributor point of view he's right but exaggerated figures
pulled out of a vivid imagination - but got the point across correctly.

Hey, if some stranger walks in to the wholesale house and knows exactly
what he wants and doesn't ask some dumb how to question the counter guys are
probably going to give it to him then ask whom for... just for my home'
cash will have him assumed working in the trade and maybe asked whom he
works for to not insult him with last column pricing on some items that book
price way up there. Computer holds the key to special customer pricing
otherwise its most likely standard pricing service last column, which by the
way mostly is 50% off retail which is fine on small odd items but popular
everyday stuff way out of line.
If he takes that material home and calls a contractor to install it and that
contractor sees whom supplied the material - hell will be raised and a
wholesaler may very well lose a good customer whom will tell other
contractors - if it happens as normal everyday thing,, that wholesaler soon
will not need to worry about extending credit to the trade, which will take
a major everyday worry off their minds and can reduce inventory levels to
make the CPA happier with ratio's & watch the gross margins rise as the net
margins fall. I could go on but I'm really not related to Turtle.

"Joe Fabeitz" wrote in message
...
As usual, TURTLE is way out there!
"TURTLE" wrote in message
...

"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