Re: Vendors that suck

On Fri, 17 Oct 2008 23:58:14 -0700, Steve VanDevender wrote:

wollman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Garrett Wollman) writes:

In article <gdbuq5$2f74$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Steve VanDevender
<stevev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From a customer's point of view, all I ever seem to experience are
Value Subtracting Resellers.

Sometimes I have to wonder. When I buy stuff from
$WeHaveABridgeToSellYou, I usually end up getting quotes from three
different resellers. One of them is a "normal" VAR. One of them is
Dull. The third is just a straight-ahead reseller, no pretensions of
any added value. For some reason, the reseller behind door number
three always seems to give me the low bid. Sometimes I have trouble
getting bids from the other two -- I suppose they already know that
they're going to be high bidders and don't see why they should save me
the effort of writing a sole-source justification. Of course, I never
tell them who they're competing against, but I can't control what
$WeHaveABridgeToSellYou's inside sales is telling them.

I had a wonderful time last winter trying to get three quotes for
equipment from a manufacturer who sells all their stuff through
resellers. $PHB at the time was convinced three quotes were necessary,
but was maybe just too lazy to write a single-source justification,
which probably wouldn't have been too hard since we were trying to buy
additional kit to hook up to an existing installation of the
manufacturer's product.

I also found out the manufacturer has a charming policy that if you ask
one reseller for a quote, they get a price, and after that the
manufacturer knows that they already gave a quote for you to the first
reseller, so any other reseller you ask gets a _higher_ price.
Apparently the manufacturer even lets the subsequent resellers know
which reseller got "blessed", as reseller_2 came back with "why are you
asking us for a quote, reseller_1 already has 'preferred vendor'
status?" So basically the only way I could get three quotes was to piss
off two resellers who knew they weren't going to make a sale.

I suspect that this arrangement is probably in violation of price-fixing
laws, as the companies are effectively conspiring to force the price
higher.

--
John F. Eldredge -- john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
PGP key available from http://pgp.mit.edu
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better
than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria
.

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