Home depot demands our stuff - first order

For the love of ----- don't let them gut you!!! I have heard story after story about big box stores killing off small busninesses. The building I am in right now was gutted by a BIG, Juicy contract with Micheals, and maybe Shopko. They kept ratcheting up the orders, and then the price concessions. next thing you know, they were ONLY making ANY money on the sawdust!!! The product had been negotioated down to the actual cost of production.

Another local businessman got a large order with Menards. It was a honeymoon deal for two years!!!!! Then they wanted MORE product. More than he could produce. He couldn't make it all. It was still the honeymoon phase. So Menards offers to finance the new factory, at a awesome rate! He has his house, everything up for collateral, they are providing the money. ---- THEN --- they re-negotiated the contract. They had benen into his books, and knew ALL of his numbers. He was working seven days a week, as slave labor to keep from loosing all his worldly possesions. Finmally, he couldn't any more, and lost it all.

Someone else spent years, and their life savings on designing doors and windows, again for Menards. They spent everything they had on the tooling, with a "partner" in China. the concessions never stopped. They had to provide XX Free units for "Demos" and "Samples" Then one day, the "Partner" in China calls and says that he has sold the factory. You go away now. ???!!! &*(^%$!! Strangley, the Same doors and windows were still being produced, and sold in the stores, but he was out of the loop, having supplied all the capitol for the startup of the factory, and financed the design.

Be VERY aware of what they can do in a re-negotiation. Lure you in with increasing sales volume, then squeeze until you die, and the fine print says that they have the right to "outsource" if you cannot meet the sales volume. YIKES.

Or, it could be the beginning of a Great thing, if oyu know what they plan to do you in the long term, and are ready for them. Pete

I've heard even worse. I won't service them big anyway, Osborn Mfg.is the big supplier to HD and has a plant in Mexico and actually makes good stuff there. I'll only supply non-mainstream products at a premium and net 10 terms. I make a lot of fringe products that the big manufacturers can't or won't due to volume issues. I also have a rep of making really, really good stuff thus I get special DOD contractor contracts and sales to customers that need extreme performance or a novel idea to solve a problem.

One day, those cocksucking CEOs are going to pull dat shit on the wrong person.

Good news - but go read Half-Nutz's post, and then go read up on some of the dirty tricks that Wal-Mart (the masters) has pulled on vendors over the years. Corporations are amoral, they pray at the Church Of Quarterly Profits and prey on unsuspecting little fish.

They grind you on the price, force you to pay for massive factory expansions to keep up with the ever escalating orders, than they take the design and have it reproduced in China and freeze you out - leaving you making payments on those fifty new machines and the shop space, and no work on them. They can BK you in a hurry.

If you CYA carefully you can deal with the Big Boys - but you'll need to run everything by a Contract Law specialist first to make sure they can't pull any of those Gotcha's on you. And might be playing the "Strike this clause, and Modify these three" every time the deal is updated.

If nothing else, don't let them be your Main Customer - build up sales elsewhere at the same time, so loss of one big account isn't catastrophic.

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I keep hearing these stories and they just don't make sense.

Negotiations require two parties. Nobody has to agree to whatever big box wants in the first place.

Also, have these "victims" forgotten that you should not compete with yourself?

Three words to remember that I learned from a local extrusion company.

Customer base diversification.

Don't let your relationship with the borg get so big that they run your business.

Tom Gardner (nospam) wrote:

Let us know how this works out. Can we ask what kind of brush it was?

Wes S

===================== Sorta like the free samples the drug dealers hand out.

As a rule no one should ever have a customer so big that they can't afford to let their business go, but the volume builds gradually, and you are making money. Then the orders get bigger yet and you lose money on every piece but make it up on the volume....

When we still made clothing here, Sears and Anthony's were famous for this. Sears also did this to their Autoparts rebuilders. Unka' George (George McDuffee) .............................. Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be "too clever by half." The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.

John Major (b. 1943), British Conservative politician, prime minister. Quoted in: Observer (London, 7 July 1991).

But they didn't go into the negotiations accepting the potential that they might get screwed, and probably didn't have the entire contract reviewed by competent counsel. (Get A Lawyer that specializes in contracts to review the paperwork.) They simply saw Big Sales and were hooked and boated.

Big corporations pay sharks in expensive suits full-time retainers or salaries to write contracts that are all in their favor, and you sign it unmodified at your own peril. With lots of performance clauses and escape clauses, and they own your intellectual property because you just signed it over, and a lot of other nasty things buried in the fine print.

Actually, yes they did. There has to be at least a little profit in each contract. You can't count on building up the volume to make it up later, because they're going to hit you for yet another price cut.

I walk into a store and ask where the quantity break is on small purchases (A gallon of milk is cheaper than three quarts, a five gallon pail of paint is cheaper than three gallons) - what makes you think they don't?

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A 6 x 19 row 7" block brush. Not uncommon, but we put a lot of wire in them.

The HD peeple are the legal-criminal equivalent of sidwalk hustlers/loan sharks/school yard drug dealers. And just plain goddamm liars.

Every company is looking to expand, grow, looking for the "big contract". A normal, honest businessperson would view such a relationship as a harbinger of things to come, an opportunity, not a g-d set up or what is basically a shell game, where, when the stakes finally get high, the pea disappears.

But you, for some fukn reason, cain't see it. So it must not be true. The only culpability these business owners have is some naivete, hanging on to the dream too hard. Nothing justifies such predation.

They broke both Paul Neuman's thumbs for hustling. And you can't see why.

9 times out of ten local vendors--the ones that are left--can beat HD prices. If they can't, it's often because HD is deliberately undercutting, or because the local guy simply carries a superior product, notably in lumber.

I go to HD mostly to price check--and, >>

Perhaps before you ship these you ought to add a stamp with an Americian flag and some slogan like "We make the good stuff" or "Our attention to the quality makes your job easier". You might also put your URL on there or an

800 number to request a catalog.

HD's customer obviously recognized your quality. Perhaps a little self promotion would spawn some more orders.

Here's an interesting quote that you might consider.

If the people already knew about yer brush, why didn't they order all 12 direct?

Good thing you got to be specific about the terms.

I have a slightly different take on the consensus about corporations. Home Depot is competing with Lowes, and it's a tight margin business now, so every penny counts in order to make a profit. The profit goes to the stockholders, which most of us will agree is all of us. If your stock wasn't making any money, you'd sell it, so they have to make money or lose their jobs. Make money and eat, or don't. Same rule applies to us all. That said, they lose money on oddball stuff they can't sell in every store, and likely cringed at the tiny deal with the contractor, because I'm sure they lost money on the deal in order to retain the contractor's business. Any company will naturally want business to be on their terms, and if they can pay late, after they've been paid for the product, then they're not in the hole for that money for that period. Would you do any different? The lawyers, naturally, get their take on the matter, so those are the folks to take issue with. I prefer the cash on the barrelhead deals. You want my stuff? Get in line. It's obvious that you're not making a lot of money on the deal either, considering the costs involved, so they shouldn't be any more special than anyone else.

I have so much on order that I cringe every time the phone or fax rings. I'm now running a second shift and have hired 7 new people. But, you have a point, the time to look for new business is when you are stuffed just to keep ahead of the curve.

"Proctologically Violated©®" wrote in message news:Pox%g.17702$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe10.lga...

Good question, single sourcing?

You raise interesting points, issues--and I'm already reaching new heights of unproductiveness here on the home front... :)

Let me just state this: I believe ***all franchises*** violate the spirit of anti-trust, and inherently pave the way for the fucking of local economies, local businesses, and the ultimate and irreversible fraying of the social fabric. Be they DunkinfuknDonuts, Lowes, McD, Staples, you name it. Which dudn't mean you cain't have a national brand. You just cain't have national *distribution* thru a single outlet for that brand. Etc. And I don't think two mega-Corps competing against each other, Like Lowes/HD, helps all that much--some, but not enough. To me, it's sorta like having the Grand Insertion shoved in two orifices simultaneously, serving only to keep the net translation of the Receiving Orifi immobilized--Newton's law, essentially, applied to economics. The Corporate Entity is likely quite the nefarious being.

Oh yeah, you mentioned lawyers..... I'll pass, so's I don't have an aneurism....

I also believe investor-driven real estate development is, once again, a Grand Insertion into every existing orifice of the (m)asses. Houses should only be allowed to be built by the people who are going to live there, apartment buildings should only be built by gummint/municipalities, and NOT for profit--the Mitchell-Lama stuff in NYC, which is, like everything else, now privatized.

Of course, what chance is there of this being acknowledged, when SocialfuknSecurity is about to be unjustifiably privatized--proly the Final Grand Insertion before the (m)asses are simply disemboweled. Yeah, we have a crisis in SS like Iraq had WMDs--butt another fukn hustle.