"Short Wave Sportfishing" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 15 Apr 2005 11:14:58 GMT, "Doug Kanter"
wrote:

~~ snippage ~~

OK....well, if you know anyone who might be interested, please let me
know,
Tom. I have one truckload left, although a large supermarket chain will
probably take it by mid-day today.

Out of curiosity, how did you come into ownership of three truckloads
of laundry detergent?

Later,

Tom

It's what I do, Tom. It's called diverting. Short example: Grocery chain
gets a deal from Proctor & Gamble, giving them better than normal pricing,
for maybe a month or two, on certain products, like detergents. P&G lets the
chain buy as many trucks as they want. They may put some on sale (for the
retail customers), or they may not. Or, if it's a product that won't spoil,
they just buy a lot because...why not?

The other thing they'll do is call companies like ours and see if we want to
buy truckloads and sell it to other chains, or wholesalers, who aren't
getting the same deal. Or, perhaps the one-month deal has passed these
others by. If there's enough spread between "normal" pricing and deal
pricing, it works.

It used to be easy until a bunch of stooges in Washington decided to see how
war affects the price of oil (something anyone can learn from just reading,
living life and watching old war movies). Before the war, freight was
$1.20-$1.40 per mile. Now it's $2.20-$2.50. That shrinks the distance we can
ship, obviously.

There's humor in the business. The manufacturers' reps are usually on
commission of some sort. Their companies don't want customers diverting
product. In other words, if Stop & Shop buys stuff on deal, they want the
chain to keep it for themselves. So, the reps whine to the buyers if they're
buying more trucks than they can obviously use in their own stores. They
threaten to cut off the deal. Then, they stop acting and leave them alone
for awhile while they continue to buy 15, 20 or 30 trucks, selling all but
maybe 4 to people like us. Why? Because they're on commission. :-)