A DANGER TO COMMERCIALVEHICLE DISTRIBUTORS
Page 39
Page 40
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
IAGREE with S.T.R. that group buying is fundamentally wrong. The important fact is that a national organization for stocking and vending supplies to commercial-vehicle users is essential to a national industry, such as road transport, that depends for its efficiency and flexibility on the personal efforts of so many small business men.
If bulk-buying groups be formed in large numbers, the commercial-vehicle distributor will disappear, and the groups will then be under the necessity of supplying each other. Thus the old distributor organization will be exactly duplicated, except that it will be less efficient in the hands of hauliers whose business is, after all, haulage and not motor engineering. The incentive for one group to oblige another is absent, and the arrangement would contain the seeds of its own destruction.
If the commercial distributor be wanted, he must be allowed to make a profit. It is no use taking his profit and then expecting him to be there when required. Let it be remembered that it was the easy access to suppliet provided by the repairing industry that enabled so many small men to start in the haulage business during the past 25 years.
Group buyers must realize that they cannot expect to skim the cream and still have a repairing industry existing on what is left. Commercial-vehicle 'distribution costs money whoever runs it. In the final analysis. both the supplying and the repairing will be done by those who can do it most efficiently, and the group buyers would do well to reflect seriously before taking over such a complicated industry. The haulier would also do well to reflect that he can change an unsatisfactory repairer, but if he be committed to a buying group he will have no remedy. it is entirely the motor trade's fault that the hauliers are even thinking of forming buying groups, and it is up to the trade so to organize itself that it can prove to the haulier beyond doubt that he cannot equal the economy and efficiency it offers.
T. G. SLATER, M.I.M.T., A.M.S.A.E.
Leicester_