Building Materials Shopping Basket

    I cringe when I hear customers talking about what about great deal they made on x project by buying materials directly from the manufacturer.

    After 20 years in the industry, rarely do I ever see a deal where that customer actually saves money.  Sometimes they lose on price, sometimes it’s service, and usually it’s both. In almost every case they are convinced they are getting the best deal.

    There’s about a dozen other things that aren’t as easily quantified into dollars that eventually costs them money. The one constant is that it eventually negatively impacts their bottom line.

    Issues with handling & storage, accounting, leadtime, quality control, warranty claims, and other complications add up to lost dollars.

    Why?

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    Home Depot vs Lowe's

    I have to be honest – this particular story came as a shock to me, and I’ve been digesting it and trying to figure out what to write since it broke.  Last week, multiple news outlets reported that HD Supply was being purchased by Home Depot for $8.7 Billion.

    On the surface, Home Depot is getting a good deal, considering they sold most of their stake in HD Supply in 2007 for $10.3 billion.  Home Depot kept 12.5% of HD Supply stock as a passive investment until 2015, selling it just prior to purchasing Interline Brands.

    So, what does this mean for the MRO supply market? What does this mean for current customers of HD Supply? What about customers of Interline Brands (now Home Depot Pro)? How will this impact Lowe’s and their turnaround efforts led by Home Depot alum Marvin Ellison?  Well, I have some opinions – and many of them won’t be popular.

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    picture of success

    I’ve had a lot of questions about what happened to my website over the last year, and I’ve finally dedicated the time to securing it and reloading as many of the posts as I could.  I also made sure I updated the User Experience and overall performance while I was at it.

    All our sites are now using LiteSpeed servers and everything seems to be working correctly both on the servers and at Cloudflare.

    I’ll be trying to churn out a couple of posts a week and hopefully a video or two here and there.  I promise to try and keep them relevant and entertaining.

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