Compare and contrast.
As any trade, we depend on our vendors to supply us with decent quality equipment and consumables and hope they don't rip us off too much. Part of this is, naturally, playing them off against each other to get what we consider to be a fair price.
Part of what the Black Queen does is this shopping around. It's not all about the price, though: if we have a good relationship with your company then we might buy things from you even if you're more expensive. Perhaps the rep comes running when we have a problem, or you'll waive a delivery charge on an eight grand piece of equipment: or maybe, like BioRad, your rep has promised to donate to a charity.
On the other hand you might have us over a barrel, and although we buy lots of pre-cast gels and reverse transcriptase and other things that come in red and white boxes, we'd really like to find an alternative supplier. Because of the ongoing 'global financial crisis', one particular California-based 800 lb gorilla of a life sciences company (think 'in glass') not only won't help, but has cancelled its internal Christmas staff parties.
Which is a shame, and not just because we like your rep.
Comments
That's a shame, I like their reps too.
Meanwhile, a certain distributor who shall remain unnamed (mainly because they can't seem to figure out what their name is) raised the quote for some reagents from $800 to $900 between Wednesday and Friday last week, due to "the exchange rate". Perhaps I am unobservant, but I failed to notice a ~10% decline in the AU$ over the same period (or even the week before).
Posted by: Viking Biochemist | November 10, 2008 06:09 PM
The $Au did crash rather violently a couple of weeks back (it was over-valued), but the Black Queen points out that reagent prices didn't decrease when it was strong.
Posted by: bk | November 10, 2008 06:17 PM