MSCJ&L Industrial

I`ve always considered J&L to be rip off merchants selling mainly crap and never buy from them. In fact had a rep in from them a few weeks back trying to force a catalogue on me. Had a few goes at telling him I didn`t want it and he just wouldn`t take no for an answer.Kept insisting I open an account to reap the benefits of dealing with them.This guy was thick skinned,I was in a bad mood,finally went after getting threatened. I need a new 10mm broach and as they had just sent in their usual 35% off special offer I thought I would price it. They wanted =A3106 or $164

Looked up the same part number on the American site,$97. Even the 35% off doesn`t bring it down to the same price. Robbing b******s.

Reply to
mark
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I expect you buy a lot more stuff than I do from that sort of place so other than J&L where do you buy. This is the sort of thing you spend years learning. I've bought a fair bit from J&L over the years and am aware they sell some crap but they also seem to sell some good stuff as well, it is just a matter of knowing which is which and what you require for the job. As regards the £ $ parity or close to it, that seems to have been the case for years (decades or longer) with all sort of stuff not just industrial equipment, just look at jeans and clothing. At least I know that some of the stuff I get occasionally from J&L is US made so has to be shipped so adding to the cost. Maybe if I did more business with J&L I could get more discount as I know they can do it as they have done at various times when it was felt necessary.

The £ $ parity thing does piss me off somewhat and that Levis pitch themselves as a premium brand in Europe with their own stores and not selling in discount places but having lived in the US they were piled high along side all the other brands and cheap.

Reply to
David Billington

Want a laugh ?

2.5mm stub drill Value brand [ read cheap Chinese shit ] DSE-10098H =A31.32 2.5mm stub drill Dormer TiN coated HSS-00326A =A31.22 2.5mm stub drill Guhring heavy duty ? GTJ-37670E =A312.15 [ not a typo ] 2.5mm stub drill Guhring Solid Carbide CGC-10250M =A34.41

Since when has a cheap Chinese drill been more than a branded ? And since when has a branded HSS been 3 times more than solid carbide?

These prices are correct, I have them on a not by the phone just to ring them up and slag them off.

I meant =A312.15 for a titchy 2.5mm drill.

The only thing I buy off them now are the three rolls of emery cloth when they are on offer. It is good, much of the other stuff last for one wipe and and all the sand and bird seed comes off.

Cutwel [ correct spelling, one L ] are decent for cutters if you are not buying in bulk.

John S

Reply to
John S

Try a bit more roughage :-)

I looked at them over the weekend for some 20x3mm ground flat stock to make some spare Biax scraper blades with. £9.09 before the discount. I decided to stick some old 7/8" x 1/8" mild steel on the grinder instead.

Mark Rand RTFM

Reply to
Mark Rand

The reverse transaction is annoying enough that I've stopped ordering books from Britain.

jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

For a couple of years I have been buying one size and grade of milling insert from Cutwel.Nothing else can compete with it. All the big names have been in running trials and can`t do much better than 50%. What do Cutwel do....make the grade obsolete and they have nothing that will compete with it either.I`ve bought all the stock but it`s fast running out. Cutwel is not a bad company,not exactly cheap for an unknown brand,but,they`ve one habit that really annoys me and that is,the last week of the month when you`re pushing work out the door,you will be interupted by a phone call from some screechy voiced bird wanting to tell you about their special offers.Telling them you will phone them if you want to buy anything does not work. Oh,and I`ve yet to find dearer threading inserts than Cutwels.The excuse...we don`t sell many.

Back to the broach.Someone has sent me a link to rotagrip. 10mm broach is about =A352 which is seriously cheap.I`m not a lover of that company either. Are these broaches made of LurpaK?

A company I sometimes use who give very good service and reasonable prices for top names is BDS Tooling in Doncaster. I`ve bought the odd single threading tip from them when I`m experimenting with grades.I don`t buy much from them so I suppose the prices are available to everyone.

Reply to
mark

Depends who's broach it is. Dumont will push a 10mm broach thru with 2 shims so that's 3 passes. Marlco / WDS needs 7 shims so that's 8 passes to do the same keyway.

OK for the odd one but when you have 70 to do it's ball breaking. Ask who's it is and how many shims.

John S.

Reply to
John S

I think the J&L problem is that they have been taken over and now have to pay back for that, also the competition has taken a knocking so they feel that they can up the prices. I live near enough to call in and I promise you they are made aware of the problem. Another place to try is Fasttools. Peter

Reply to
Drawfiler

I think it's also partly a matter of culture, rather than merely greed, and not being up-to-date and web-savvy.

In the old days a company would have an account with a tool supplier. An account rep, sometimes the salesman but sometimes the account repship would be passed around, sometimes for money - would provide information about prices, delivery and so on.

The tool supplier would also provide a catalogue so the reps weren't swamped with information requests and so their customers could browse their offerings.

Reps - who in many ways ran the company - would offer discounts to their customers, initially (waaay back when) a few percent, later tens of percent, sometimes 60% or more. This meant that having an account would be a very good thing for the customer, tying customer and supplier together.

Further measures were taken to strengthen that tie, for instance if the customer bought all his tools from one supplier then he got an even bigger discount. Actual discount levels were often kept secret: "I'm going to give you 65%, but you mustn't tell anyone"

In order to be able to offer large discounts on what was the majority of their sales, the catalogue face prices would be very much higher than the actual average selling price.

It also meant that a customer who wanted only a few items, not enough to get an account, had to pay the top, artificially inflated (by all those discounts) price. Outside the inner bunch of account holders, the catalogue price was seen as the "real" price, while those inside the bunch thought smugly of their discounts.

That was the old way, and it worked for a while. But now the internet is changing things. Information - such as technical information about items for sale, prices, delivery information - can be given much more cheaply on a website than by having a human give it. Done right, it's cheaper for both the customer and the supplier.

Suppliers who work in the old way still have to pay all those reps, after all, so their prices, even with/without discounts, are too high, except for the very biggest accounts where the cost of the rep is lost in the noise.

Suppliers who work in the new way have a website and open pricing, discounts are not secret (Buy ten and get 20% off! Buy 100 and get 25% off!) except at the very top levels, where an extra discount is sometimes applied to the biggest account holders - usually around ten percent or so, not the 35-60% levels seen in the old style relationships.

This cultural change is working its way through the industry, often beginning at the low volume end and working it's way up. In some parts of the industry it is nearly complete [1], and it's hardly started in others.

Methinks J&l are in the second category.

[1] sometimes it has gone too far - if the automated systems aren't doing the job it can be hard to get information from a human instead.

$164 less 35% - $106.60.

Item sells for $97 in US. Add 20% VAT, new price 116.40

Another, more likely scenario: Item sells for $97 (£63) in US. For export/import costs, add say 10% - new price $106.70. Add customs duty @

2.7%, new price $109.58. Add 20% VAT, new price $131.50 (£85).

Yes, £-$ equality is wrong - but it's not all the supplier's fault.

I think you may have blamed the wrong robbing bastards. :(

-- Peter Fairbrother

Reply to
Peter Fairbrother

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