rockauto jacks their prices up a little at a time the more you buy from them.
they get you in by cheap prices. Then you get hooked on "cheap" and the more you buy the more expensive it gets pretty soon you're paying closer to msrp. I used to buy quite a bit from them. Not anymore but there are several reasons for that.
don't like the prices start your own tractor company and let us know how that works out
i own a business (LLC) and people would be surprised what it costs JUST to DO business. Self employed health insurance costs me over $1000/mo and that's considered cheap! Then there's GL insurance, vehicle insurance, inventory insurance, building insurance, franchise fees, taxes out the ying-yang, and everything else....if I bring in $10,000 a month, about $5100 of it goes right to the government...I'm doing well at 10% after expenses but that is how business goes. If you do enough volume to pay your bills, you've done good!!
McDonald's margin is less than 1% at most restaurants. So how do they make so much money? VOLUME. John Deere took note of the McDonald's business model and they said hmmm...we can do the same thing let's make a cheap plastic lawn mower that we can sell a few million of at Home Depot and Lowes....that was the beginning of JD's Mass Marketing, and in the last few years I've been seeing it with Kubota too. Thus, I decided to go away from Kubota and into a totally different line of work
when I said I see it with kubota, I mean that Kubota is pressuring small mom-and-pop dealers to improve the dealership, add space in a lot of cases, basically telling them hey you're too small we want you to spend a bunch of money so that WE can like your dealer, and if you don't, we're gonna make you stop selling our stuff. Exactly what Deere did. I went through it and saw it happening starting in the mid 1990's and finally the dealer I was at told Deere to stick it where the sun never shines; and they focused on Kubota. Now Kubota's doing it too. I don't like it (obviously). A small mom-and-pop dealer is able to give a thousand times better customer service in most cases because they know that reputation is EVERYTHING; whereas a larger (chain) dealership(s) can move a lot more equipment and bigger equipment in a lot of cases, which makes them a ton more money...but when an old man walks in the door of the dealer and says I want a lawn mower, the salespeople turn and walk off hovering over the phone so that they can sell an SVL95S with a mulch head....they make a LOT more on that than a lawn mower. Thus, the old man walks out the door and goes down to Home Depot and picks out the Deere he can stand to use, and drives off with it. In comparison, a small dealer's sales guys typically value EVERY customer regardless of the type equipment. I have seen this happen, and even as a shop maggott myself, I found that when the dealer I was working at for almost 30 years got bought out by a large corporation, they place a whole lot more focus on big stuff and big money than they do on the little stuff. It's sad to see but it's the way things go.
