ridiculous shipping charges

[bloke]

McMaster quoted me $26 for shipping two small (kids' lunch raisin-box sized boxes) of 100-each peel rivets.
AND sales tax.

I went online and searched for something better.

I found where - for only fifty bucks more - I would end up with 500 of one of the sizes and and 1000 of the other size (rather than 100 of one size and 100 of the other size for $50 less) for only $50 more (over 7X as much product)...so to hell with McMaster - at least on peel rivets.

This other source is a place that normally sells WHOLESALE, but decided to set up a website to sell MODERATELY SMALL (500 - 1000, vs. quantities such as 10,000 and more, etc.) of this, that, or the other to end-user small businesses.

ALSO...
I HAVE BEEN having to order these rivets too often...so this solves that issue as well.

[bort2.0]

"...and handling"

[ghmerrill]

I have pretty much given up ordering from McMaster for this reason. It was never exactly cheap, but not truly prohibitive.

[gocsick]

I used McMaster and Grainger all the time over this last year.. for work when I was on sabbatical. You are not their target audience. Their customer base is businesses where something is needed asap because equipment is down or a fitting is holding up a project.. and shipping is cheaper than sending an employee out to 3 different stores to find that exact thing we need. I would have a daily list of stuff from all my engineers and trade guys..and at 3:30pm I would place the order for early morning deliver. Endmills and lathe tooling, electrical fittings, handtools, welding rod, plumbing stuff, safetry gear, cleaning supplies etc.. it was all there and the premium in price was 100% worth the convenience.

[bloke]

All I know to do (post-shutdown - most of the time) is just get gouged, and then pass on the "gouge" to my customers.

I am fast, but/and I try to charge $XXX/hr. Even when people are here (and know how long I spent compared to what I charge them) they often thank me for (they say) reasonable pricing.

...so whatever, I suppose.

anyway...no ordering boxes of 100 peel/sheer rivets for a long time, and I got them for a ton less per rivet.

bloke..."It's just a little bit annoying for people to ask me - with 'case repair' skills being pretty pedestrian - to fix their freakin' cases...but - I suppose - whatever on that as well...ie. while you're rebuilding my car's transmission, would you mind also balancing my tires?...BUT - LONG AGO - THIS BECAME CUSTOMARY... "

[solar_vale46]

gocsick's point explains the pricing: industrial catalogs charge for speed and certainty, because their typical customer has a machine down and will pay almost anything to get a part tomorrow. For shop consumables like peel rivets, the cheaper approach is to buy a year's supply from a wholesale source once and keep a simple reorder list with a minimum quantity for each item. The small fast supplier then becomes the emergency option only. Billing materials as a separate line on repair invoices also keeps those shipping costs from quietly eating into the hourly rate.

[bloke]

I was willing to pay TWICE the amount per rivet from McMaster, but I know damn well that I could have shipped those two little raisin boxes full of rivets most anywhere in the United States for $10 to $12 Priority Mai including insurance for up to $100.

....so I went to a more wholesale type of source probably still third down the rung from the Chinese manufacturer), bought seven times as many rivets for (after McMaster's crazy shipping charge);only another $50 bucks, and there postage for a lot more weight was about $7 less.

My friend of mine pointed out to me that since this top-down orchestrated shutdown, everyone is just charging everyone out the ass, because they can, and markups have increased astronomically (not related to cost).

Daring to barely set my toe into the political here, everyone - who didn't vote for the current chief executive - wants to blame the current chief executive for gas prices that are almost as high as those reached under the previous chief executive, but it has nothing to do with the cost of even refined oil. All of the oil companies are making land office record profits. They're making those profits because they saw us pay those prices under the previous administration, assumed that we will be willing to pay them under this administration, and we - in fact - do pay them. If we stop paying them and did stuff like carpooling, combining trips, and even begin (such as 100 million of us) doing things like going to the grocery stores with our neighbors and those sorts of things, those oil companies would eventually drop their prices, because their current profit margin is the highest on record, and - again - they are only charging us the prices they are charging us because we are willing to pay them, and all we do is say stuff about them rather than doing anything about them.

pop rivets:
I didn't just gripe and pay the price; I did something.
gasoline:
Because of strategies that we have embraced in our business and family, we are not paying any more for gasoline at this price than - in the past - we paid for gasoline at a third less price. We did something. (Also, we've never bought big honkin' cars, because we've lived through a whole bunch of epic gasoline price increases, now that we are in our 7th decade of life.)

nice-to-have purchase: (unnecessary expenditure)
Most all guitar and bass guitar tuning mechanisms are now built in China or somewhere in Asia. Those on one of my Fender instruments work just fine and are made very well, but (though Fender used these for a few years on their five in-line previous five-string basses - back when they did five in-line), because they are the style that are typically installed on other makes of basses (as so many people tend to hear with their eyes). I just decided to swap them out for (bass guitar) the classic Fender "cloverleaf" style. I figured out how to buy them straight from the manufacturer, and bought (not just a set of four, but four plus a single inline extra - because it's a five-string bass), and bought the set of five including shipping for half the price that McMaster was going to charge me for 200 measly-ass pop rivets plus shipping.



Aside from the ridiculous roughly $27 shipping cost that McMaster was going to charge me for those two little raisin boxes of pop rivets, they were charging 20 cents per rivet. The place that sold me 1500 rivets charged me 8 cents a rivet. If I could just find the Chinese manufacturer - and were they willing to sell me only 1500 rivets - I bet I could buy them for two cents a rivet plus $5 shipping from China.
If the only place that something is made is China, why pay two or three American middle men if we can help it? If the Chinese manufacturer will sell them directly to us, what "service" do American middle men actually provide? In the United States, if we're just not going to manufacture some things, don't we really need (bottom to top - from construction site unskilled helpers to medical doctors) a whole bunch more blue collar workers, rather than a bunch of resellers?

[travisd]

Unless things have changed drastically with them, McMaster has usually had reasonable shipping for me - I went back and looked at prior orders and just about everything was in the $8-11 range, for a "small box" of stuff - lately it's been high pressure fittings and stuff for the compressor, or specialty hardware for fixing parts on the old RV.

I'm not consuming large quantities of any of this stuff. What I do need though are detailed specifications, like knowing that the head on the extra-wide flanged button head screw will in fact clear the moving parts of the drawer sliders that I need to re-attach to the factory bracket. Or, knowing that the quick-disconnect that I'm buying does in fact have a 5000psi rating on it, and will mate with the other stuff I already have. (Learned this one the hard way - McMaster supplies the real Parker ST fittings. The Amazon stuff doesn't always want to mate with the real stuff... )

McMaster seems to be really tightly integrated with their shipping services, so I suspect that shipping pricing closely reflects the distance being shipped. I seem to be close to one of their hubs which not only probably helps with shipping fees, but also has resulted in some crazy fast shipments, like a standard shipping order turning up the next morning on my porch.

[arpthark]

I also paid $11 for shipping on a box of doo-dads recently. It was a box of 4-40 threaded rod and some nylon screws to whittle into valve guides.

I plugged two boxes of those peel rivets into their site with my address in CT just to see and it had shipping as $13. Interesting...

Glad you found a cheaper solution, regardless.

[bisontuba]

Shipping ANYTHING these days has gotten SO expensive.
..

[bloke]

My stuff probably ships from their warehouse out of a suburb of Atlanta, which is on the western (favorable to me) side.

I know good and well I could have shipped those two boxes of rivets through the post office for $12 (Priority Mail) and - even if I wanted to charge $5 handling - that would have only been $17.

Admittedly, McMaster-Carr does offer really quick delivery (often next day) so maybe their rates are some sort of bulk-discounted overnight shipping rate (??)

If they are actually purchasing overnight shipping at a bulk rate, I guess $27 is an okay rate. It would be nice to be able to choose fourth class mail or UPS Ground or something like that, but they don't offer a choice.

[gocsick]

Today the Owner of the small company I'm doing doing consulting work for just sent a company wide memo reminding people that all purchases for tooling, hardware, and consumables are to be made through Grainger, McMaster etc via PO. Additionally, trips to the hardware store, welding supply Depot, etc are only allowed with permission from company leadership. The justification that even $40 express overnight shipping for a $0.75 bolt is less expensive than sending the lowest paid employer to Home Depot at a fully burdened rate of $100/hour (Salary benefits, etc).

[bloke]

If some parts supplier rapes me on the shipping, I can then - in turn - rape the person that owns the instrument I'm repairing.
In particular, institutional owners of instruments don't give a damn what they are charged for anything in particular, because it's not their money.

If I'm buying supplies that I use on a whole bunch of instruments, I can't rape anyone in particular and immediately recover the ridiculous shipping costs.

Again, that set of cloverleaf style bass guitar tuners from China: They were 35 bucks for the set (a very popular and respected maker, called Guyker - not boutique, but reliable and respected) and I paid $6 to have them shipped from China to my house.

I'm not a large business, so I'm able to make practical decisions and observations, rather than group-think or rule-based ones.

We all know that right now fuel is nearly as expensive as it was during the midst of the Biden administration and - because bankers and rulers of the UK are egging on the war between Ukraine and Russia (with Ukraine using large English manufactured drones - as well as UK-loaned money - to blow up Russian diesel refineries) that diesel in particular is priced very high right now, but even at that, the shipping charges - these days - are often way higher than the actual shipper charges the supplier and is nothing but profiteering. ... I can still send a 13 ounce package - with either a mouthpiece or mouthpiece components in it - to some place like Seattle (this is 3 day service) for only about 13 bucks.

Friends of mine who own businesses that are a step or two larger than mine (such as remodeling and the trades and so forth) have noticed other businesses just charging crazy prices for stuff that they know are triple or quadruple or quintuple what those things actually cost... Blatant profiteering.

Even so-called conservative commentators such as Bill O'Reilly (who people perceive is typically sticking up for business) are commenting on this tendency, and have pointed out that the gasoline prices we are paying are nothing more than profiteering, and that all of the major oil companies profits are higher arithmetic amounts and far higher percentage amounts than they have ever been throughout the historically of oil refining and oil sales.

[Mary Ann]

I'm still trying to find non-poisonous cat food for my cat. That tends to go the direction of specialty raw. I found some I was willing to try due to the lack of chemicals added, and the food came to $64. They wanted $81 to ship it. Back to sardines and hamburger and raw chicken, and even if the nutrition is lacking at least the poisons are also lacking.

[bloke]

I'm still trying to find non-poisonous cat food for my cat. That tends to go the direction of specialty raw. I found some I was willing to try due to the lack of chemicals added, and the food came to $64. They wanted $81 to ship it. Back to sardines and hamburger and raw chicken, and even if the nutrition is lacking at least the poisons are also lacking.

I know about the raw chicken thing, but considering the bacteria that could be in it, I would probably do a cooked chicken thing if I got completely away from stuff that comes in cans.
I'm still able to get chicken thigh quarters in 10 lb bags for about 80 cents a pound.

Maybe ?? Once they were boiled or de-boned the actual meat would be $1.20 a pound. It's trouble to boil a bunch of chicken and strip it off the bones, but 8 cents an ounce is a whole lot better than $0.30 an ounce or more for those little tiny cans of cat food.

Cats' stomach acid is a lot more acidic than ours, and can kill a lot more bacteria a lot more effectively, but still...