beastmaster
Harmless
Posts: 38
Registered: 28-5-2008
Location: USA
Member Is Offline
Mood: hyper
|
|
Graingers for supplys?
I have been buying stuff from graingers for years and never know they sold chemicals and lab equipment. Has any one purchased chems or lab equipment
from them and know their policy of selling to an individual?
http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/laboratory-supplies/test-in...
|
|
|
watson.fawkes
International Hazard
Posts: 2793
Registered: 16-8-2008
Member Is Offline
Mood: No Mood
|
|
Quote: Originally posted by beastmaster  | | I have been buying stuff from graingers for years and never know they sold chemicals and lab equipment. Has any one purchased chems or lab equipment
from them and know their policy of selling to an individual? |
Strictly speaking, Grainger is wholesale-only,
which means they sell only to business. On the other hand, they're very much used to dealing with small contractors, even down to one-person
businesses.
Grainger acquired Lab Safety Supply in 1992. It looks like they've much more recently decided to use their main brand for selling some of the same
stock. To my eye, it seems like they've consciously decided to step into market niche opened up by the main chemical suppliers being so restrictive to
the small player. They recently signed a supplier agreement with a consortium of universities; it went into effect just two months ago.
|
|
|
GreenD
National Hazard
Posts: 623
Registered: 30-3-2011
Member Is Offline
Mood: Not really high anymore
|
|
sooo... can we buy from them or no?
|
|
|
Bot0nist
International Hazard
Posts: 1559
Registered: 15-2-2011
Location: Right behind you.
Member Is Offline
Mood: Streching my cotyledons.
|
|
Why not contact them. Sound professional, but don't lie or be suspicious or circumventing
U.T.F.S.E. and learn the joys of autodidacticism!
Don't judge each day only by the harvest you reap, but also by the seeds you sow.
|
|
|
DieForelle
Hazard to Self
Posts: 61
Registered: 2-2-2012
Location: East Coast
Member Is Offline
Mood: No Mood
|
|
It would be nice, wouldn't it? I tried to place an order a couple months ago for something next to harmless, 500g of Spectrum EDTA, on the Grainger
website. I've have an account there for over 5 years. It initially accepted the item and pre-auth'ed my credit card.
However a couple days later I got a call. "We can't ship that to a residence" "OK" "but I can ship to my store so you can pick it up" "OK, fine"
Another 5 days goes by. Order disappears from the Grainger "your orders" website section. I call back.
"That supplier prohibits their items from being sent to a residence, a restaurant, or a Grainger location for customer pickup".
You didn't think it would be that easy did you LOL...also they only sell a subset of their items, a lot of obvious things were missing like ACS grade
HCl.
The thing about Grainger is they have a nifty catalog with a bazillion SKUs but their price on any given thing isn't that great. They're best for
huge commercial accounts that order 1000s of items a year and they cut those people a discount. Still when I need something really odd, really fast,
like a metric tap and die set, I'd rather get it from them than from a fly-by-night internet business that may or may not have it in stock and will
give you the runaround for a week.
[Edited on 2-2-2012 by DieForelle]
|
|
|
GreenD
National Hazard
Posts: 623
Registered: 30-3-2011
Member Is Offline
Mood: Not really high anymore
|
|
yeah all of their reflux apparatus come in sets of 6 lol.
|
|
|
zgoat65
Harmless
Posts: 11
Registered: 27-1-2012
Member Is Offline
Mood: No Mood
|
|
I am a small (one person) business owner and order many parts and tools from grainger. I order most solvents and acids from them with no problem uh
ntil I wanted HgCl2. This cannot be shipped to a residence OR a branch office for pick up. So my order had to be cancelled. If their local branch
will recieve it, then you should have no problems.
zgoat65
|
|
|
DieForelle
Hazard to Self
Posts: 61
Registered: 2-2-2012
Location: East Coast
Member Is Offline
Mood: No Mood
|
|
Which Grainger sub-supplier were those coming from? It seems like LabChem, Ricca, and Spectrum are the 3 main real chemical suppliers listed there.
When you tried to order the mercury compound, it was probably coming from one of the lab suppliers and that's why your outcome changed. Of course
they have many other chemicals that might be far more hazardous like sulfuric acid for drain cleaning, coming from "industrial supply" as opposed to
"lab supply" companies. Which, of course, makes it that much more ridiculous that Spectrum freaked out over me trying to get some Disodium EDTA, but
that's the way it is. Why do they even want their products to be listed at Grainger, if they are going to vet the customers in the same way they vet
their direct customers? Why wouldn't those people just order directly from Spectrum in that case?
Earlier I thought of starting a new thread or bumping some old ones...then I thought, why beat a dead horse? But the attitude of lab suppliers is so
insanely paranoid, it taxes my mental facilities even to try to adapt their worldview. (The availability of pure controlled substances and direct
precursors is another matter related to drug policy, so I won't even go into that) First of all, as past and recent lab accidents show, there's no
guarantee that only selling to "real" labs run by people with "real" PhDs is going to prevent their products causing harm. That was obvious even 20
years ago with the Zumdahl thermite disaster, and I'm sure there were plenty of chances to demonstrate it even before that. And when I worked in a
corporate research lab in the 1990s, there was a totally cavalier attitude about various things. Our PI let a hot chick take home some Pharmco USP
100% alcohol one weekend to make very hard punch. That was just what I knew about...who knows what other diversions could have been going on. (that
lab, btw, doesn't exist anymore)
Maybe it's just simple math like: our commercial liability insurers would charge us $2mil more a year to sell to individuals, but we think we'd only
recoup $200k. It certainly isn't economies of scale: look at Mouser and Digikey: they are happy to sell you a 10 cent resistor, if you want it, but
probably service accounts like Intel that do 10s of millions a year in business. I've even gotten a cold call from a guy at Texas Instruments, EVEN
THOUGH I SIGNED UP ON THEIR WEBSITE AS AN INDIVIDUAL, asking me if I needed any information about their audio chips! Can you imagine Aldrich calling
one of us to see if we needed any information about their chemicals! LMAO! But I wonder, was there ever an era sanity prevailed? As we know up
until at least the 1930s, you could buy all sorts of things at pharmacies. Aldrich was started in a garage but presumably stopped selling to garages
when...in the 50s? When I was a kid in the mid 80s who wanted to "experiment", even as late as that, I bought my first chemicals at an old-timey
pharmacy. (That place is long gone, too.) I definitely suspect the 60s, the era of Timothy Leary, was a major turning point...but I wonder, was it
the start of the insanity, or the final nail in the coffin? It's just hard to find anybody who really knows. If you tried to order Merck chemicals
to a residence in the 1950s, what happened? I do think the meteoric 20th century rise of the pharma-industry - independent of the question of
psychoactive substances - might have had something to do with it. There would have been the recognition that one could circumvent, in some cases, the
economic model of "controlled distribution through professional authority, profit through patent protection". Remember in the past much simpler
chemicals were used, in some cases, as prescription medications. For example, sodium thiosulfate for kidney stone control. Some historian of
commerce could probably have an interesting research topic.
If you want some mercury...and although I used to do run-of-the-mill chemical experimentation when I was younger, I now think "why in God's name would
anybody want that stuff?" I still think you should be able to buy it if you want it, and that it's none of Spectrum's GD business what you intend to
do with it. I mean, what if every time you bought a laptop from Buy.com you had to sign an affidavit saying it was only going to be used by someone
with at least a BS in comp sci, that it wouldn't be used to distribute kiddie porn or aid and abet terrorists. Or every time you bought peanut
butter, you had to sign a statement saying you would keep it 100 ft. away from anybody with a peanut allergy. Anything can be harmful - look at how
easy it is to buy guns & ammo in this country, not that I have a problem with that - but the lab industry either thinks or has been coerced/duped
into thinking their products cause some kind of special, insidious harm.
[Edited on 30-3-2012 by DieForelle]
[Edited on 30-3-2012 by DieForelle]
[Edited on 30-3-2012 by DieForelle]
|
|
|
![[*]](images/xpblue/default_icon.gif){kind=icon}
