When independent distributor Scott Maroney was a technician, he found it frustrating that tool distributors did not have pricing easily viewable on the inventory of the truck.
“Every tool truck I went on I’d go to buy something, and the guy had to look it up,” Maroney recalls. “I always wondered, ‘Why does nobody put pricing on stuff? Every store in America has a price tag.’ It didn’t make any sense to me.”
Maroney recounts one instance in particular while working at the dealership, when a work colleague of his had purchased a set of pliers off of a tool truck for a certain price.
“I went out to the truck and wanted to buy this [same] pair of pliers,” Maroney explains. “He (the tool distributor) said, ‘Oh, that’s $110.’ Wait a minute, the guy next to me bought these for $80.”
“That really irked me. I’m going to pay you for these, and now you’re going to jerk me around? At that moment, I was already thinking about quitting my career at the dealership. I thought, ‘If I ever do a tool truck – which I always wanted to do – I’m going to put prices on it.’”
Maroney now prices each product on the truck with a sticker, for transparency to customers.
Maroney will offer a 10 percent discount off the sticker price for customers who pay in full; but otherwise generally follows the sticker price regardless of the customer.
While it can take a bit of extra time to put stickers on all the items, Maroney says it has now become part of his routine when checking in inventory.
“It’s just natural to me when my boxes come in,” he says. “I go through it, I price it. That’s just my routine. You get in the habit of doing something.”
