There's a place around here that is a distributor with a showroom too.
He got tired of dealing with 'shoppers', and he had/has a lot of local
firms he supplies with parts, so he went to just supplying those and
closed the showroom. It was nice when he had the showroom and I could
pick up the odd zener or something, but now he doesn't stock much...
It's a small office operation.

So, when he was closing, he told me that if I needed any part, he could
get it in a few days (it was that way for non-stocked items previously,
it was now just going to be the norm). I asked what advantage there was
to that over Digikey for instance. He said 'none'. If someone called for
a part, he would just call Digikey, get it, mark it up, and tell the
customer it's in... He said his customers were used to operating that
way, he had billing options down, and no one complained.

I chalked it up as market inefficiency. Seeing as how he started before
the current way of doing things, he has customers because he had those
customers. I doubt he could start up like that now. As they go away, so
will he. The only value he adds now is in being in the customer's
payment system, making it easy to order for the corporate engineer
perhaps. When that customer gets a Digikey or other account for some
other reason, his value goes away. Since he's higher than them in price,
he's motivating them to move at some point as well.



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