Can anyone recommend a place I can order 3-foot U-posts in big lots of 100 or more? Looking to pay a lot less per stake when we buy in bulk.
I’m talking about things like these:
So far I’ve only found places that sell in lots of 10 at per-post prices higher than Home Depot sells them for individually.
Go back to Home Depot, go over to the contractor/pro desk and ask them if you can get a deal on 100 (or whatever you need). Even if you’re not a business, they’ll often give [bigger] quantity deals if you ask.
Give Uline.com a check. A good place for bulk items like this.
Thanks for the replies so far. Going back to Home Depot and asking for a better deal in bulk looks like the better option. Uline only sells the longer ones that cost a lot more and are way bigger than we need.
Have you checked Grainger or maybe Tractor Supply?
Thanks, I checked those. One of them was a bit more expensive than Home Depot, no bulk pricing, the other didn’t sell them that short.
I was thinking of the sort of stores that would supply farmers and ranchers.
But Home Depot and Lowe’s have huge volume advantages.
Grainger isn’t exactly known for their great pricing.
Sold by the ton
Yeesh, what is it with that site and zooming? I usually have my text zoomed large due to vision issues, but that site was just unusable with my usual settings. So I tried to zoom back to normal text size, and that site refused to let me do it, it kept popping back to text that was way too large for their frames.
Do they offer the stakes at 3-foot size? How much do they charge by the ton, how many stakes per ton, what’s the minimum order, and how much lead time? What little I managed to make out from that horrible site suggested it might be shipped on a slow boat from China?
Yes, I think it’s safe to assume that something inexpensive and heavy like this is probably going to be sent via container ship. But what happens if you order a ton of these but find the quality is too poor to use? I think you’re better off buying from a place like Home Depot where you can return or exchange the product if the quality is poor.
Okay part of the problem was that was a mobile link and I’m using a regular browser. When I went to their non-mobile site it behaved much better.
That particular item is sold by the piece, not by the ton, minimum order 1000. It’s a very nice price if we needed 1000 of them, which we don’t. 
Also 2 weeks at least to get them here. We need this fence staked down a lot sooner than that. Their site also didn’t say what length the stakes are but we could deal with them being up to 6 feet, I guess, if it meant saving that much money. A real PITA driving 300-ish 6-foot stakes all the way into the ground, though.
When I built the addition to my house I asked the drywall supplier if there was a discount if I bought all the sheets at once - like 50 sheets or something. He pointed out another customer from a construction company that bought 500 sheets at a time. He got 5% off. Individual buyers are small potatoes to supply companies.
You might try asking at a local rental company that specializes in construction equipment as opposed to homeowner rentals. They may know a supplier.