Reply #51: Something you may want to consider, Pyrogen

[jmowreader]

I'm slightly familiar with the Kohler wholesale price list, so I'll use that one.

I pay $8.63 for a Kohler plastic toilet seat when I purchase a case of them to sell in my store. I turn around and charge eleven and change for it.

I'm not exactly a mom-and-pop operation either; I work at Home Depot. We are the largest Kohler dealer in the world. If anything, we should be undercutting Wal-Mart on price and we're not. I'm not sure about the rest of the company, but at my store the only store we're trying to put out of business is Lowe's. (And if we hire too many more of Lowe's employees we may just do it.)

Wal-Mart cannot go forever charging half of the wholesale price for a toilet seat. Let me tell you how they work:

They start off by selling $8.63 Kohlers for $3.97. The mom-and-pop plumbing suppliers and M&P hardware stores wind up going out of the toilet-seat business. (Incidentally, some Wal-Marts have a map with pushpins marking the locations of their competitors. When one of the "pushpins" goes out of business because of Wal-Mart, they have a party.)

Next, they get a Chinese company to make a toilet seat they can profitably sell for $3.50. It looks like a Kohler, kinda. It lasts six months to a year. And it sells like hotcakes. Which makes my toilet seat business start hurting.

Wal-Mart's goal is to be the only retailer in the world.