I am now dating myself but here goes. One of our wholesalers, good people, did about 10 million a year in 1/3 the space with the same number of people we did about 300.000 a year and our retail space cost more to rent then their's. Our cost to sell per dollar is close to 20 times their cost. It is not entitlement but a fact of life It cost far more to provide service and display then sell from a warehouse shelf. Your attitude is why brick and mortar shops are closing. You compare to mail order and online and say it is our fault because we cost more. Because of that attitude our shop went under. I am just trying to point there is 2 sides to Lark's comments and at different times both sides are correct.
The Lark Wrote:
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> I'm afraid the first part of your reply is perfect
> validation for everything I wrote.
>
> Hobby stores already receive a substantial
> discount. If your normal discount is 40% why do
> you feel entitled to an additional discount just
> because we run a limited 10-20% off sale to our
> own retail/website customers? Giving you a 50-60%
> discount would have pushed us into bankruptcy.
> This is the kind of problem I battled for years. I
> wish hobby stores would wise up and realize their
> entitlement mentality is badly misplaced.
>
> I realize hobby stores have rent, labor costs,
> insurance, and other expenses and I wish for them
> to survive. However, when you sell a $50 item and
> get to keep $20 of that to pay for store expenses,
> you make more than enough as it is. That's not
> even a fair tradeoff for the manufacturer
> considering how little the hobby store does in
> comparison.
>
> As to your second point, I totally agree with you.
> That's unacceptable.
>
>
> Skip391 Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > As a former retailer I find Lark's comments a
> > little one sided. I have seen when wholesalers
> > reduced the advertised price but not their
> price
> > to dealers. It is nice to say volume will make
> > dealer more money but then you keep your markup
> > the same so you make far more yourself. We
> found
> > discounters that were getting better wholesale
> > prices then we were. Then to make things worse
> > the same discounters were telling customers to
> > come to our shop for service and to try the
> > products and then go back to them to purchase at
> a
> > lower price. They saved lots of money by
> having
> > us be there unpaid customer service. We could
> not
> > compete. The wholesalers encourage this
> because
> > they got more volume and many old and well run
> > shops went under.