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Permalink Reply by Geoffrey King North Yorkshire on July 8, 2012 at 17:18

Hi Duncan,

No complaint from me about what you are saying, there are good reasons why I don't work for them anymore, some of which you have highlighted.

I get our ironmongery from a specific supplier, and we carry stock to overcome 'stupid' prices & traveling long distances to get small items.

But we/ I are always on the look out for keen prices or promotions, always visiting the damaged tins part of any Supermarket, that's how I was brought up. LOL

There is a tendency for suppliers, Screwfix, Amazon et al to promote stuff that in reviews was a crap product.

Being aware is more than half the battle.

One of the few advantage of Merchants, is that they have delivery vehicles, which YOU are paying for, unlike local saw mills that charge a premium for delivery relatively.  If you always collect, it will be cheaper to cut out the middlemen, provided you have the time to travel further afield. In our case everywhere is much further afield. LOL

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Permalink Reply by Brett Sheridan on July 9, 2012 at 9:31

Morning all,
There's some great nuggets of information here and some very valid points too.

I don't think it would be right for me to get into the conversation in detail on this public forum but would round-up to say that we don't do anything to treat anyone differently from the next person. There are, of course, benefits to trade customers but we treat all customers equally and with the same level of respect, no matter what the annual spend or frequency of ordering is.

Regarding promotions, I feel I must highlight that it is not our prime objective to get anyone to spend money they did not intend to but rather to attract those who are looking to make a purchase to buy from us instead of the competitor down the road.
We have seen some clever promotions from competitors recently, which prompted the initial post on this forum to open up to a wider network of those in the trade who no doubt, will be much more receptive to offers and deals that may have been promoted recently.

If anything, this thread has highlighted the frustrations that some in the trade seem to have with merchants and that is something we can definitely take on board to prevent us ever going down the same route.

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