I own a small manufacturing company. We like most American companies are working to pay taxes and keep our heads above water. In the process we have to buy tools. We probably buy $130,000 worth of carbide, tool holders, live tools, etc in a year. These companies force us to get EDP numbers, descriptions etc, and type them in an e-mail, and send them off to distributors who quote the tools, and then we have to approve quotes and then we order tools. Then they come and we have to administratively pay them via check, and their reps just drop in and draw us off our work unannounced, and it's just a big huge pain in the ass. The reps don't help the customer with anything. They don't find tools for us, they don't stock inventory, they don't solve manufacturing problems.

This is 2017. We could MUCH more easily simply search an EDP, put a tool in a shopping cart, and purchase it. The distributor is just an undesirable entity in the middle, adding logistical time, adding administrative headache, and then floating discounts around a lot of the time, so one day you get a decent discount, the next day you get screwed, and EVERY day, you're paying someone in the middle to relay your EDP's to the tool company in a torturous process that SUCKS. It ends up with the customer feeling paranoid scyzophrenic, feeling alienated, being stressed most of the time and just unhappy about the whole situation.

Why do these tool companies hate their customers so much? Why do they feel like business wouldn't work if they gave us logins and discounts on their website and allowed us to order our tools there?