McMaster-Carr Catalog

You are not the only one, not by a long shot. They treat them like gold, well, actually more valuable than gold.

Lane

Get over it. And use their Web page

- it's actually handier than their catalog for two reasons. First, you can search it. Second, they offer many products that aren't in their current catalog (like machine files) that show up on their Web page.

Their catalogs are very expensive to make and they made a conscious business decision to only send them to companies with whom they have a reasonable expectation of doing several hundred dollars a year in sales with.

Grant

Adam Smith wrote:

Grant Erwin wrote: (clip) Their catalogs are very expensive to make(clip) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Maybe if they printed more, the unit cost would go down. No maybe about it. The fixed costs of printing, including photography, design and layout, color separations and actual press setup do not go up if the order is doubled.

Are royalties paid on the photographs? And is it based on the number of copies? That could increase the cost.

My inquiry of a few years ago, submitted on a company letterhead, didn't even warrant a response from them. I'd suggest you do what I do, which is to avoid doing business with any company that doesn't have enough respect for their customers to at least be gracious for their attempts to do business with them.

Harold

It's a mystery to me also. I started a business around 1983, spent around 2 grand the first quarter, they sent me a catalog. Sold the business, moved, started another shop with a different name, spent over

15,000 the first half year, no catalog. ???

I realize these aren't large sums of money, but WTF??

Drop me your address offline, Harold.

Jim

================================================== please reply to: JRR(zero) at yktvmv (dot) vnet (dot) ibm (dot) com ==================================================

This seems odd to me. I have gotten three in the past 6 years. The old ones have been given away to posters here. I have only a small business and they treat me like a king. I do all my ordering from their website, but a paper copy is great to have when I am looking to solve a problem and do not know what is availiable

On Sun, 22 Feb 2004 22:00:35 -0800, Grant Erwin brought forth from the murky depths:

Feh! For them, additional catalogs cost pennies apiece and each generate hundreds if not thousands of dollars in sales. They're a marketing piece. A big brochure, if you will. Perhaps McM is playing psychological games. Uncle Bob sez: "If something is hard to get, it must be valuable."

*(Robert Cialdini, Ed)

-- If it weren't for jumping to conclusions some of us wouldn't get any exercise.

- Jump-free website programming

"One of my good customers called me a while back and said he had the new McMaster-Carr cat but that they didn't buy from them. He wanted to know if I wanted the book. I jumped at the chance to replace my old dog eared copy.

Doug Arthurs

Doug Arthurs wrote: .(clip) I jumped at the chance to replace my old dog eared copy. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Seems to me that if McMaster-Carr is that worried about the cost of supplying catalogs, they could SELL them--then apply the purchase price as a discount on the first order. I wonder if they're reading this.

I wonder if another aspect to this policy might have to do with avoiding arguments with people over prices in the printed catalog. If most folks have to shop via the Web, it's easier to keep pricing up to date.

When I started setting up my basement shop some years back, I got a copy of the MSC catalog from the local office by just walking in and politely asking for one. The younger guy there talked about their web site, and I said yeah, that's nice, but you can't flip pages on a web site. And a catalog is an invitation to browse and see stuff and say darn, I gotta get me one of those. That was when the other guy not only pulled out a new in-the-box catalog but asked me if I wanted a CD-ROM to go with it.

Tove

The catalog is much better for browsing. One day, while waiting for an item at the Atlanta will-call desk, paged through the catalog and found at least five more items that I "needed".=20

I have one suggestion for them: Offer the catalog for sale. List it prominently on the home page, and the first page of the catalog itself. =20 I'd bet that if they printed an extra 1000 catalogs and offered them for $20,00 each, they'd be gone in the first month. (The ones they ship to companies that don't need them end up disappearing quickly on eBay.)

To reply, please remove one letter from each side of "@" Spammers are VERMIN. Please kill them all.

OK, everyone here who wants a McMaster catalog: Go to their web-mail page and offer to buy one. Give a price you think reasonable to cover printing and shipping. If they get enough requests, they may realize there's a opportunity for profit in catalog sales.

To reply, please remove one letter from each side of "@" Spammers are VERMIN. Please kill them all.

Ccan someone please tell me who:

"MSC: is?

Thank yoy.

Refinish King

I must be spending enough, I just got a new one two years in a row, up from every other year. I spend several grand with them last year.

And yes, I have #'s 106 and 107 available for the cost of postage and a box, to the first two respondents via direct email. Due to various news servers delays, a direct email to me is the easiest way to determine the first two responses.

Jon

Manhattan Supply Company, though the only reason I know that is from seeing some very old boxes at work. They just go by MSC these days.

My theory is that they send a new catalog after you've accumulated about $1500-2000 in purchases since the last catalog. I get one every 2 years or so, and over the past

10 years the arrival of a new catalog seems to correlate pretty well with the actual level of purchases.

Ned Simmons