(Time to read this blog article about 30 seconds)
Lowes Canada, the giant American-owned home improvement retail bought Rona Canada last year and is now demanding an extra 2% discount from suppliers to help pay for the cost of store upgrades, conversions and staff training. Lowes Executive VP says he “wants to emphasize a partnership approach.” What does that even mean?
What it means is that Lowes and Rona negotiated low, low cost prices from suppliers with added concessions to wring out every penny from those suppliers and now come along and demand an additional 2% discount, after the deal is done. With partners like this, who needs enemies?
More and more big retailers are turning into bullies and dictators. They make deals…then they break them. And nobody has the guts to tell them where to go. Back in my Cooper Canada days, a Sears buyer told us that he wanted to see all of our cost sheets so he could tell us how much he was prepared to pay for our hockey equipment. We told him that it was our job to determine the price that we needed to charge to make a decent profit and it was his job to decide whether or not he wanted our stuff. Apparently, those days are gone. What a shame.
