this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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A Wild West for Crayola prices.

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[–] KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 44 points 2 days ago (3 children)

For instance, the report mentions an employee of the City of Boulder, Colorado, who purchased a 12-pack of Sharpie markers for $8.99, while an employee of the nearby Denver Public Schools was charged $28.63 for the same product on the same day.

$28.63 for a pack of sharpies? Whoever looked at that price and thought that ordering it from Amazon was the way to go needs to go back to school themselves.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Wow, that's a bigger ripoff than Grainger. At least they give discounts for business accounts that spend a lot.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

What's even worse is when you have to go through a third party to buy from grainger.

A previous company wanted to increase their "diversity" which I agree with but rather than actually hiring diverse people or anything actually helpful they decided we could only purchase easily through this company. It was made very difficult to purchase from anyone else.

We needed 5 gallon buckets periodically. We used to buy them for 2.68 per bucket and 1.57 for lid. We used about 10 per year. Through this new company it was 87.10 for a 10 pack.

Worse what you had to do is go onto grainger.com find the item you wanted, go to their website, put in the grainger part number, some point typically within 72 hours you would get an email with a quote, go back to their website enter the quote number, purchase the item, and the item would arrive in a grainger box. But since you didn't buy it from grainger the "to" entry on address label was for who ever made the quote. So you had to go to the warehouse and ask if there was any packages. They would ask for the po number and then have to manually check all the packages for that number in the attn field of address labels. There was about 1000 employees in the building.

They wanted to use that company as it was "diversity owned" so they could claim most of their purchases were from "a diverse owned company"

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