Office supplies: a monopoly on paperclip sales?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve been experiencing an interesting case study in how localized monopolies work, and from today’s news, it looks to get even worse.

We used to have an Office Max a few miles away, and a Staples a little closer. (Nearest Office Depot was quite a bit further away.) Now, in decades of buying this stuff, I’ve always found OD to have the best selection and Staples to have the best prices, but it’s all kind of selective. In California, all three stores were within the same radius and I learned to go to one for one thing and the others for others.

Where Staples always exceeded was in having a really cheap item in most categories - $2/ream copier paper (well, for certain values of ‘paper’), $3 boxes of envelopes, $6 boxes of manila envelopes, etc.

Then Office Max buys Office Depot a year or so ago… and “consolidated” the very few stores they had here, closing the one nearest us. No big deal, Staples is still there, just in a shopping plaza I don’t have much other reason to visit. (I also buy a lot less of this stuff these days than formerly.) The nearest “Office Blank” stores (as I was wont to call them back when they were everywhere) are now well over 25 miles away, leaving this Staples with quite a large island to itself.

So right before Xmas, I stop in to buy some little colored envelopes to hold “voucher” presents… and the price is so high I had to check to see if it was in rupees or something. I think it was $7.99 for 12 little, middling-quality eps in a few puky colors. So I searched, and finally found a little packet of such for about $3.00 on the clearance table.

In the process, though, I looked at prices on a lot of things I have routinely bought over the years. ALL of them were jacked to the moon. There were no “Staples” prices on anything. Paper, desk bits, pens and pencils, envelopes, folders… only the kind of prices that would make me shop elsewhere, before-times. It’s one of the most egregious and blatant “We’se gotcha by the short ones; pay up or feck off” moves I can recall in recent decades.

I just said, “Wow, your prices” to the gal who ran up my $3.00 purchase and she sort of looked at me under her eyelashes and say, “I know.”

And in today’s news, kids… Staples is buying out Office Depot (now with extra Office Max).

$5.00 boxes of paperclips, anyone? :dubious:

2

Nonsense. You can buy office supplies (especially basic stuff like paper clips) at Walmart, Target, Amazon, Costco, etc. In fact the presence of these other outlets is one argument Staples will make to get the deal approved. And who buys paper clips any more?

3

Have you ever considered buying your office supplies online?

4

Amazon.

5

This winter may be a special case, since blizzards out west knocked out a lot of the paperclip trees.

6

They closed the Staples store that was a few blocks from me Saturday. There is a vrey small Office Depot not too far, and a large office Max a bit beyond that.

I buy most of my stuff on Amazon

7

That’s going to cause problems with the wire clothes-hanger crop in future years, too.

8

Even for Staples and Office Depot/Office Max, a lot of their sales are via the paper catalog (remember those?) or the website, and are delivered directly to larger companies. I wonder how the revenues break down for retail sales vs. online ordering.

9

The part that surprises me is that Office Max bought out Office Depot, rather than the other way around. I’d practically forgotten Office Max ever existed, it’s been that long since I’ve seen one of their stores. I’d assumed they’d got squeezed out.

10

There are certainly many places to buy most of what “office supply” stores sell, but such stores occupy a narrow niche for convenience, selection and specialty items in the market. I don’t really want to buy one box of paperclips from Amazon Prime. Or 12 pencils. Or yellow pads. OTOH, I don’t want to waste time going Target or the grocery store to buy whatever pathetic, home-use option they might stock.

The problem is that one-third of the customers rarely buy such stuff and have no idea how much it costs, so $18 for a pack of six yellow pads is unremarkable. Another third are buying stuff on a company credit card or account, and probably don’t care about the prices at all. It’s only some middle portion that buys the stuff a lot, does it on their own dime and is both sensitive to price and not totally undemanding about selection and quality.

11

I bought a box of paperclips in 1993 (complete with magnetic desktop dispenser). I am pretty sure it is going to last me the rest of my life, it still looks full.

12

Do they still harvest those? I thought with the advent of farm raised plastic hangers that harvesting the wire ones was too cost prohibitive.

13

The Crawfordites won’t settle for plastic ones. Don’t leave big enough welts. So there’s always a market for each year’s crop.

14

The brick and mortar stores (Walmart, Target, Costco, Sam’s Club…) all have a very limited office supplies selection compared to Staple/Office Depot.

You can’t get immediate delivery with Amazon, eBay and other online sources. You also can’t get cheap items cheaply online (the $1 brick and mortar item either has $4/$5 shipping attached or the price is marked up to $4 to $5 or is marked store only in the online catalog…)