Comment by fake-name
3 years ago
McMaster is great.
This article is also completely glossing over another reason to use them: Their shipping is somehow insanely fast.
Almost everything is next-day delivery, even for standard shipping. They've somehow got their logistics COMPLETELY nailed. I believe they have their own agreements with USPS/FedEx/etc...
McMaster is generally not the cheapest, but they're almost always the fastest and the easiest.
Machining/industry runs on McMaster.
> They've somehow got their logistics COMPLETELY nailed.
In addition, you can generally get a useful human on the bloody phone at these companies!
The delivery priority is because their customers are losing real money until that shipment of parts to repair their production line comes in. If those parts don't come in when they're supposed to, the people who cut checks are gonna start yelling.
However, I tend to prefer MSC (https://www.mscdirect.com/) over McMaster if I can--especially for machine tooling.
It really feels like McMaster really relies on the fact that they can be a "one stop shop" so my experience has been that things tend to be slightly more expensive and with "servicable" quality and with "very good" delivery. However, with a bit of Internet-Fu, you can generally find a better version of the McMaster product at the same price point.
MSC is sooooooo expensive for tooling though. Or pretty much anything. Unless you're a business who cut a deal with them so you don't pay list price.
I also can't find anything on their website, what a terrible search and catalog functionality they have. Like the opposite of Mcmaster.
Really? Admittedly I haven't used them in earnest since before the plague ...
However, a quick look shows them to be dead on price for Mitutoyo dial calipers. Boring heads look a bit more expensive than I remember. Milling bits seem normal price-wise as well.
Who is your go to? Machine tooling is always expensive and I'm always looking for places that are cheaper.
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One benefit McMaster gets is that they have so much stuff that they tend to be the first place you think of when you need some random item. A couple years back I had to build a prototype machine that would inspect wells and I needed 4" diameter clear PVC pipe. Went to McMaster, and of course it was there :-)
I'll second that. I ordered an 8-foot-long aluminum bar for $25, which, at the time, was too long to ship with traditional shippers. So, a semi trailer showed up at my door. Shipping cost $8.
My experience around their shipping was the opposite— surprise outrageous fee to get fedex to deliver a few feet of PVC. This was back before they showed you shipping prices up front.
Yeah their checkout experience used to be horrible. Shipping costs were never displayed until the order shipped and it was often 10x the item price.
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How can they make money doing that?
Next time he’ll buy $20 worth of bolts and pay $80.
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Most orders pay full cost of shipping. This was an atypical experience.
No idea. I talked with the truck driver, and he said we was being paid way more than $8 for the delivery. I used my company account, so I guess they're willing to take a loss on some orders and make it up on others.
Might I ask what for?
I don't know the GP's reason, but I also orderd long aluminum profiles for LED installations (it's needed for heat dissipation, and also helped with mounting in my case).
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8' is a standard length for metal bar. OP might just have been buying their normal increment.
Art project to repurpose an IKEA lamp in to kinetic wall art.
Indeed, even in rural parts of the country orders placed by 4-6pm still arrive next day[0]. This saves calendar days on projects; its often not till 4 or 5 that the full list of missing fittings/parts/tools comes together.
[0]Sometimes you need to spring for air shipping if you are in the sticks.
And on top of that you don’t even need a business account. Individuals get the same service. I’ve ordered hard to find parts like tiny springs for home projects, just a few bucks. It’s amazing.
Yes. I'm missing an unusual screw from the armrest of my office Ekornes Stressless chair, and the closest Amazon length didn't work. I've seen the Mcmaster website before, but thanks for the reminder! I jumped on it, found the right screw in seconds.
Yeah, if you're in a large metro area (I was about 1 hour from the Atlanta distribution center), they would often ship SAME DAY if you ordered by about 10am. It was amazing, and very convenient during chaotic times when you forgot to order one tiny little piece of hardware that was needed before your custom built tooling could be delivered. This was in 2005 - 2007 timeframe, before Amazon started the 1 day stuff.
Central New Jersey: Same day shipping, cheaper than ground: Order before 11, get it after lunch.
They have a distribution center just outside of Trenton that does will-call - I've ordered things at 2pm and picked them up at 4.
You can get same day in some areas. We usually get next day in Reno.
Yup, McMaster-Carr and ULINE are well known for usually being next-day on standard shipping! Saves a lot of headaches and projects.
I didn't write about shipping speed since the Amazon standard is now 2 days or less. Yes their shipping speed is great, but it isn't a striking relative advantage, comparing against the rest of e-commerce
Do they ship to Australia? Any idea if that is also comparable to Amazon delivery speeds?
Probably not. They don’t ship to Canada. Don’t be fooled if you’re able to place an order with a non-US address. I was able to, before getting an email the next day when they realized their mistake.
Weird – I have been able to order parts for a client in the UK. I've used it mainly for connector harnesses.
I love their connector harnesses and I have standardized all my prototypes around them. It sounds expensive at first, but it's cheaper and less annoying than making them myself or hiring someone to do it for me.
We use them all the time here in Mississauga. Generally we're getting next-day delivery (I think they have a warehouse in Cleveland). It's not the cheapest option, but they are great for projects still in development as they almost always have exactly what you're looking for. The customer service is also fantastic.
They'll ship to Canada (as far as I understand), but only for "serious" clients that make it worth the cost to them.
Which is a shame, I'd love to be able to use them.
They ship to businesses in Canada (you have to open an account with them I think, our purchasing does that), but not individuals.
> Almost everything is next-day delivery,
Could it be that you live next to one of their warehouses?
On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member.
>On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member.
I'm not so sure about this. I'm not a prime member and I frequently get orders delivered before the estimated delivery date. On the other hand I also see instances where amazon takes suspiciously long to ship something. A charitable explanation might be that their logistics capacity (eg. planes or vans) is limited, so if you're not a prime member you get deprioritized.
At my college town around 2013, any prime delivery would always take a day longer than it was supposed to. Saturday delivery wasn't common there at the time so you had to get your order in by Wednesday morning at the latest otherwise you'd be waiting until Monday.
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I’m absolutely sure that there is an amazon FIFO for orders that sometimes get delayed days in shipping in order not to build up an unnecessary queue that wouldn’t get emptied for pickup. Probably has a lot to do with them running their own logistics.
Likewise, Amazon almost always delivers to me before their estimate and the estimate is very standard. No one else I order from is doing better.
I avoid using Amazon, so as you can imagine, I don’t have a prime membership. It doesn’t seem to matter.
Prime is a nasty scam. If you compare the final pricing on the same item in a Prime and non-Prime account you'll see what I mean.
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Compared to Amazon, MMC has a very small number of SKUs, inventory that never goes stale, and prices that are only affordable in the context of B2B transactions. It’s not a comparable service.
And also zero counterfeit products that will burn down your house.
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DigiKey eliminated everything except next day air for small packages some years ago because it was too expensive to have two different SKUs for shipping small orders in their system. B2B is weird.
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Perhaps. But all the more reason for Amazon to streamline it's UI and UX. Instead it's consistently a textbook case of TMI. If you're not paying close attention you're likely to miss something.
Maybe you didn't see the Footnote:
Footnotes
[1] "Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not." https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
People complain about the prices, but it isn't like only businesses can afford them.
I buy screws there all the time. It isn't like it is $10 a screw! It's like a nickel or less.
No, they have next day shipping to the whole US.
In other words, standard shipping is always next day?
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> On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member.
Sounds like a conflict of interest if they literally start transit then delay at some point. Like maybe retailers shouldn't be able to own shipping
Plenty of dedicated shipping companies do exactly the same thing (if you don't pay for next day then they'll deliberately delay it so it takes 5 days or whatever you paid for), it's got nothing to do with being owned by a retailer or not.
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They don't delay the shipping, they stick the entire order at a chosen point in their queue.
If you split the fulfillment off from the retailing, the fulfillment will still have a queue.
Should the government mandate first in first out or something, no ability to pay for priority?
I am no logistics engineer but I always figured it was a batching operation.
you delay for up to a week, this lets you build efficient shipping batches.
It’s nuts. I’ve had mcmaster packages come from far enough away overnight that there were hardly enough minutes for UPS to drive it this far. But definitely not flown judging by the terminals it went through.
Our office is near their head office/distribution facility. If we order before noon, most stuff shows up same day.
I'm ~12 miles from one, and they are as fast as amazon
I would consider 12 miles to be right next to it from a shipping perspective...
I.E., With USPS you can pretty much assume that you are going to get a letter next-day if it comes from your state