Supply House Blues

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Curtis4President

Curtis4President

Member
Location
Near Seattle
Hello all. I am bidding a city job, ( so are 19 other ECs). Anyway my supply house, says they cant get me my lighting # until bid day. Is this happening to you fellas? I need the number at least one day prior to bid to all prospective GCs. On bid day is ridiculous, the GC needs the number so they can pick which EC they want to enter the bid with. IMO this is crap. Everybody is shopping for a competitive price these days, we are too. But to tie the ECs hands by not giving me my # is not cool. Oh well , I vented any thoughts????



Tim:mad::mad:
 
Fulthrotl

Fulthrotl

~Autocorrect is My Worst Enema.~
Location
HB, CA (19 Hrs. 22 Min. from Winged Horses)
Occupation
E
Curtis4President said:
Hello all. I am bidding a city job, ( so are 19 other ECs). Anyway my supply house, says they cant get me my lighting # until bid day. Is this happening to you fellas? I need the number at least one day prior to bid to all prospective GCs. On bid day is ridiculous, the GC needs the number so they can pick which EC they want to enter the bid with. IMO this is crap. Everybody is shopping for a competitive price these days, we are too. But to tie the ECs hands by not giving me my # is not cool. Oh well , I vented any thoughts????



Tim:mad::mad:
Click to expand...

this dance is common in civil engineering... you'll have a guy on a cellphone
20 minutes before bid closing, penciling in stuff from subs.... it's like open
heart surgery.... not much fun....

if you read all the threads here on bid mania, you'll see it really doesn't matter
anyway.... cause you'll have a bid of $55k, and someone else will bid the same job at $23,500

see this thread for clarificaton: Our latest bid results.....HAHAHAHa...

relax. enjoy the ride. have some salsa and chips, and a corona.....
 
J

jim dungar

Moderator
Staff member
Location
Wisconsin
Occupation
PE (Retired) - Power Systems
This has been the industry common practice in this area for almost 30 years. Lighting reps are the worst, gear manufacturers are second. It comes from the electrical contractors "shopping" prices back to their favorite manufacturer prior to bid. If you think bid day pricing is a nuisance to you, try talking to your distributor quote person, it sounds like they will have to call 20 contractors with prices.
 
J

JWCELECTRIC

Senior Member
Location
Massachusetts
Any other supply houses in your area that you can get a number from? When you get the job start a bidding war with supply houses to see who will get lighting package.
 
C

cdslotz

Senior Member
This has been going on since forever. If you DO get a price the day before, well, you have a "street price" and not the low price that will go out 5 min prior to the drop-dead bid time.
Your vendor may not get the best price from the ltg rep either.
The reps rule the universe. They can dictate who gets the job. They return favors or punish distributors for past behavior. I have distributors tell me all the time, that they were told they are getting the best cut for this job. Well, I just heard that from my other two distributors, so two of them are being lied to.
On big lighting jobs, I might get a call from the lighting rep telling me that I will have the best number and he will quote me direct. In return, he wants feedback on the other quotes I have received.
So if you insist on pricing early, you may get it, but that's just to get you out of their hair.
So when your GC is screaming for a price, tell him he will get his when you get yours.
If you play along with the game, your turn will come up.
 
Curtis4President

Curtis4President

Member
Location
Near Seattle
Thanks gentelmen, I appreciate the input. It seems to me, this is what everybody is getting. So ill bid it with an allowance for the lights, and hopfully change my # to the correct one once I get it( prob 20 minutes to deadline)

Thanks again
Tim:grin:
 
LarryFine

LarryFine

Master Electrician Electric Contractor Richmond VA
Location
Henrico County, VA
Occupation
Electrical Contractor
Curtis4President said:
. . . my supply house, says they cant get me my lighting # until bid day.
Click to expand...
I'd tell them that you can and will find a supplier who would be happy to work with you, not against you. Why be loyal to someone who treats you that way? You're their customer, not the other way around.
 
bradleyelectric

bradleyelectric

Senior Member
Location
forest hill, md
LarryFine said:
I'd tell them that you can and will find a supplier who would be happy to work with you, not against you. Why be loyal to someone who treats you that way? You're their customer, not the other way around.
Click to expand...

They can work with you for a book price but not a package price. The prices are held from the lighting reps not the supply houses.
 
E

emahler

Senior Member
as was said, it's not the suppliers...and any job where there is a package, if you bid with book price, you'll never get the job...

commercial lighting is second only to the Mafia in corruption and unscrupulousness...

when a project like the one in the OP is involved, there is what's called a "bid package" for all the lighting, gear and anything other than pipe/wire/devices...

next time you see a job like this, just call your supplier and tell them you want to be put on the bid list...

for the lighting, you can put that quote out to 10 different supply houses...the pricing for the spec'd fixtures will all come from the same local lighting distributor, who goes to the regional distributor, who goes to the national distributor, who goes to the factory.....

all 10 supply house get the same price at the same time (10 hrs before deadline) and then give you the price with their markup...

but because you have to deal with one specific local rep, you're burned...

unless as was stated earlier, you are big enough that you might be able to bypass the supply house completely....and deal directly with the lighting reps...
 
MarkyMarkNC

MarkyMarkNC

Senior Member
Location
Raleigh NC
emahler said:
commercial lighting is second only to the Mafia in corruption and unscrupulousness...
Click to expand...

Yep. Except their is more honor among the Mafia.

Having worked for a supply house for two years, I can tell you that it is usually not the fault of the supply houses. They are probably getting a number from the light rep 30 minutes before the bid is due. Oftentimes the light rep will exclude certain fixtures or cross fixtures that are not to spec and the supply house has about ten minutes to figure this out. The counts on fixtures the light rep quoted will be from either whoever got them fixture counts first, or the contractor they are working with on the job. If the fixture counts the contractor sent in to the supply house are different, the supply house has to pretty much guess on the difference, as fixture prices are never broken out by fixture.

The game is fixed so that the fixture reps have several days to try to slide a quick one past you, while the supply house has about ten minutes to make sure they are not shooting themselves in the foot.

The gear reps play the bid day game as well, but are a lot more up front about it, and far less likely to try to sneak a fast one by you.

The lowest level of hell has definitely been reserved for the light reps.
 
C

charlietuna

Senior Member
This is a method which allows fixture reps to give a certain supply house the better price, who in turn gives a certain contractor (selected by the fixture rep) the better price. The rest of the contractors get the bid package price. The same thing happens with gear prices on large jobs. It''s hard to beat the selected contractor unless he gets greedy-but it happens. I had one fixture rep near double his prices on a multi floor tenant buildout where he thought he was "locked in" because the base fixtures needed to be matched to other existing floors. Building owner caught wind of it and had the job's fixture spec changed to another manufacturer and had us change ALL the fixtures on his floors! I don't think that fixture rep ever got over that--he almost had a heart attack!!! The games played in the supply houses are never ending when it comes to "BID PACKAGES"!
 
C

CopperTone

Senior Member
Location
MetroWest, MA
I'd like to use the term dirtbags when describing lighting reps but I won't. 3 weeks ago i got the lighting package last minute - at 8am - bid was due at 12 noon. As I was handing in my sealed bid to the girl at the desk at 11:45am in downtown boston on the 5th floor of a high rise building my phone rings and it is my supplier telling me they just got the "corrected" lighting package which was about $6k less. I didn't have another blank bid form or envelop to reseal - I had to hand it in as is. We lost it my more than 6k but that wasn't the point.

A week later I got the package 4 hours before bid was due and half of the fixtures were not quoted because of discontinued model numbers or incorrect numbers - so the lighting rep sat on this job for over a week and knew it couldn't be quoted, didn't supply a cross reference, and the supplier had to find the closest thing for a price.

the last thing I would do is estimate on your own - some fixtures are rediculously expensive - you could get burned big time.
 
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