From my experience, you want to stay away from Grainger unless
you are really desperate. Dang near everything they sell is
way out of sight price wise. They do own Speedair and Dayton
so if you need either compressor or motors then you're stick
wit them.
There are a lot of other things that they alone carry but in
general I look in another direction when shopping.
We used to have a local dealer who was an outlet for
Grainger's overstock and returned items and you could get a
lot of stuff at reasonable prices but he grew old and bought
the farm. His son closed the place down.
After doing a tiny bit of research I see where they acquired Zoro a
few years back and it's aimed at the consumer and small
business man, e-commerce only. Their attempt to compete with
Amazon apparently. It looks to me, that the way a lot of e-commerce
is run, the company has no warehouse, everything is drop
shipped from the manufactures. So when you order an item
from Zoro it might come form Grainger, or Zoro Tools previous
suppliers or any one of hundreds of manufactures they've
contracted with.
Does that sound like I got it right???
I worked with a guy that sold out of his home, something like
a franchise. Had no warehouse and just kept a few things in
his garage. When he got an order he just relayed it to the
company and they shipped it to the customer. Bought a set of
a dozen real cheap kitchen knives from him for six bucks 30 years
ago and we're still using them daily.
dg
Last edited by Denny Graham; 03/25/2015 1:10 PM.
