Try Fastenersinc.com These guys are great. I buy from McMaster Carr as well but Fastenersinc.com is my first stop. They started here in our town and have several brick and mortar shops in the region.
"Hit ya hard" is an understatement, a pack of 6-40 set screws was about 7 bucks and the shipping was $22! I asked about sending it by mail and they said sure but no tracking. Huh? Priority Mail has tracking. Yeah but we only deal with UPS so we don't provide tracking for Priority Mail. So how much is the shipping if we do PM? $15, and it has to wait until somebody goes to the Post Office for something. That's double the cost and no idea when it'll ship. No more McMaster for me.
I can, and not rape my customer on shipping in the process, I do it several times a week. I have a commercial account with McMaster and MSC and I was trying to do more business with McMaster but I can't see paying ridiculous shipping fees. I understand they have a system they have refined over the years and it works for them but if you charge me $15 for what I know cost (at the time) less than $8 to send Priority Mail it's going to get my attention. Especially when it doesn't require any extra effort, you can process the package, print the label and then stick it in the mailbox, you don't have to wait until somebody goes to the post office. That is beyond ridiculous. And I also know they don't care about my $30 a year business so it's no big loss to them if I never order from them again. I don't care about the 8 or 10 bucks but I do care about the way I get treated as a customer and that tells me a lot.
Yep, part of their "tried and true business model", if it's not x, y or z we can't help you and we have zero interest in trying to provide any sort of customer service. We make millions a year so we don't have to worry with these little guys. Did your business start at 30 mil a year or did you start small and work up to that? People tend to forget that pretty much every business starts small but a lot of them grow into something big and the service provided will have an affect on the relationship down the road. It's way too easy these days to process postage for small orders from your desk and take care of the little guy, pirateship.com is free to use and you never have to leave your desk. Look how many small order guys are on this thread and how many home shops there are, most gunsmiths are small home based shops. If you're only interested in the big fish just make the minimum order $5000 or something then you won't have to deal with any of them.
Evidently, in your need to defend McMaster for some reason, you've misunderstood my post, I'm not upset about anything related to McMaster, there are some things I don't understand but I'm far from upset. Having dealt with customers for the last 40+ years I know there are folks you can't help but at least I tried to help my customers, even sending them to competitors for products I thought may have been better for their application. The op had a question and I was relaying my experience, he's free to do whatever he wishes, as we all are. I wasn't looking to be treated special, never asked for that or expected it, if they had told me when I asked about the shipping there were no options then the interaction would have ended there but it didn't and they surely didn't "go out of their way to try and do what I wanted", far from it. I've had customers order stuff for less than 7 dollars but I wasn't an asshole to them because they'll remember how they were treated for an insignificant order when it comes to placing a larger order, I can't imagine what it would be like as a customer dealing with you.
We used to make some of the house brand tools for Brownells and all we heard was the quality had to be top shelf, never complained about a quote. We stopped dealing with them when that swapped around. Your assessment of their search function is correct.....
