"TURTLE" writes:
Earth to Jeffrey , If you think Home Depot is giving you a big discount on
equipment such as HVAC stuff. I run a HVAC contracting business and sell at a
30% mark up on parts. Home Depot sells at a 50% mark up and if I sold at Home
Depot's prices I would have to go up on prices by 20% higher. Whatever Home
Depot sells for $1,000.00 -- I sell for $850.00 or so.

Earth to Turtle -- clearly you didn't bother to look at Home Depot's
financial statements. While results for individual items may vary,
Home Depot's gross margin according to their latest 10K filing is just
shy of 32% (not 50%), giving them an operating margin of
10%. Considering that their buying power allows them to get better
pricing than other supply houses let only the price that wholesalers
sell to contractors like yourself, I find it hard to believe that your
retail pricing is on average 20% better than Home Depot. Now that
doesn't mean that there aren't individual items where you can beat
Home Depot on price, just that I don't believe that you can buy from a
local supply house, add your own markup and still sell parts on
average 20% cheaper than Home Depot.

I see now that I step out here in a bunch that does not know what Wholesale
prices really is. What the bunch here has been told by the internet hvac
suppliers and Home Depot as a super discount wholesale pricing is a joke. What
you can buy off the internet and pay shipping on the stuff with no warrenty , I
sell for the same price or lower and warranty it with free labor for a year.
What the bunch here calls a wholesale prices is what I call Retail prices.

Great I will make a deal with you. When I need HVAC parts, why don't
you sell them to me cheaper than my best Internet price and you can
make even more profit than you do now since I won't ask you to install
the part or warranty it.

If the public could buy at real wholesale prices. There would be no more hvac
contractor and everybody who works on them would be just Do it yourselfers and
if you had a real problem with the freon system to try to fix.

This is a ridiculous statement. Contractors would be needed for installation
and repair and would rightly price their labor to cover their overhead
plus profit. Only a small fraction of the population in my neck of the
woods would ever even think of doing a minor repair themselves let
alone a major HVAC installation.

If anything, the clearer delineation between the true cost of parts
vs. labor may lead to more work for contractors since consumers would
have more faith that they are getting what they paid for.

You would just
have to go buy a new one for all the real tech that could fix it would be in
other businesses. Now look at Repair of refrigerators and freezers. The only
ones left is Sears and sellers of the Refrigerators and freezers. If it gets
outside the warrenty limits. It become too costly to repair because of the only
ones that repair these freezers and refrigerators is the sellers of them and
they have driven the price to the moon to repair them so you will want to buy a
new one from them when the warrenty runs out. I'm the only one in town that
knows how to really repair refrigerators and freezers but I only work for
customers that I do their HVAC work for and just don't need the extra
refrigerator business. The repair of refrigerators and freezers are far harder
to do than HVAC work because of all the electronic controls on them now days. I
think a refrigerator is hard to work on and a 20 ton rooftop Package unit is
easy as hell to work on.

A complete non-sequitur.

The decline of the repair business has more to do with the fact that
the fast pace of innovation, the declining costs of production, the
relative high cost of U.S. repair *labor* (not parts) and our overall
throwaway mentatlity and newer-is-better culture encourage consumers
to prefer buying a new one to repairing the old one.

In the market economy that I live in, consumers whether consciously or
unconsciously on average make an economically (near) optimum decision
that says it is not worth repairing the old.

In fact, the only time it often makes sense to repair is when you are
a DIY since the major cost of repair is labor not parts. Which brings
me back to the original point that efficient market economics calls
for more transparently separating the costs of labor and materials so
that consumers can make rational choices about how to spend their
money.

Jeff