I just have to start this one off by saying Thank You to the best customers that a company can have! I mean it! You have continued your support of our small business through all of these strange times, from us not being open to having to wait in your cars and trucks for us to come out front to help you. When this pandemic was starting to show its ugly face my mind went into survival mode…What changes could we make? How many people would have to be sent home? How’s our finances looking?
As it turns out there must have been part of the Governor’s executive order that I missed…. the part about stay at home and do all your home improvement projects!
Our business hasn’t slowed in any shape or form and some areas, like treated lumber, are moving out of here faster than a buttered bullet shot out of a rocket full of monkeys!
People want a quality product for a good price and while yes we MAY be a tad higher on some treated items (that’s some items mind you) than the big box stores they can’t touch our quality! I spend a lot of time sourcing the kind of lumber that I would want to use from different lumber mills around the world. Just yesterday I had a customer dumbfounded that our 2×4-8ft spruce was from Germany. I explained that sometimes European lumber could be purchased buy the truckload at a comparable price to say a west coast spruce and traditionally the Euro would be better quality because some of their mills have some different grading capabilities for a nicer board. Lumber is a commodity, prices change hourly, there are wild price swings up and down that are driven by many factors. “Well there is a hurricane forecasted so lumber prices are going up.” Maybe but not always.
Most of these price swings are connected to supply and demand or uncertainty in the market. When a hurricane is in fact forecasted to make landfall the lumber mills know that a spike in needed materials is coming so they step up production, buy more logs, hire more people, lease out more trucks and this drives material costs up! Just like now, the corona virus has multiple lumber mills shut down and with these mills not producing the sometimes millions of board feet of lumber everyday we rely on the still producing mills to step it up and keep us in the lumber. This causes some items to be hard to get and in general drives the cost of lumber up. It truly is a mind blowing, educated, guessing game when it comes to knowing the best time to purchase lumber with all of the weighing factors that can and will change daily! I love it and when you actually hit it right with a quality stick and can put a few more pennies in our pocket…YESSSSSS!
Well this thank you letter got quickly out of hand but maybe the next time you come see us and purchase that piece of lumber that you have always wanted you will stop and think about where that board came from and its journey from a seed, grown into a tree, harvested and milled. The hands it has passed thru, the countries it has passed thru on the way to its final destination! It truly is remarkable!
Thanks for the business.
Come See Us.
Hedgecock Builders Supply
Recent Comments