when Grimco bought Alumapanel, they tossed everyone out and we in Alabama lost the best source for aluminum that we have ever had. There was absolutely no sense in them buying them out and dismantling that whole complex. Someone obviously is on a mission to be the "walmart" of sign goods
Not everywhere.... they kept most of the staff at the SC Alumapanel location.
Aside from that a lot of this is just like FedEx / UPS is terrible comments and threads. The bad experiences are very much a regional or local branch problem. At our last location UPS was terrible and FedEx was awesome. Where we are at now it is just the opposite. We used to use Sign Supply USA a LOT who was one day gobbled up by Proveer who we still used because they kept the same folks we knew, who was one day gobbled up by Grimco who we now use because they still had kept some of those same folks. We also used Alumapanel and now at least a few of those folks are now at Grimco. Prior to Grimco buying Sign Supply USA we had really never used Grimco much at all.
They are now close to us (1 day delivery on things in stock locally). They have always bent over backwards to help us out on oddball requests and have given us some very aggressive pricing on materials.
Again though - I think it very much depends on your local branch and sales rep.
From a business standpoint my thoughts have always been a business is pretty much one of three things.
1 - goal is to stay small and own it forever
2 - goal is to grow huge and conquer all your competition and buy them out when you can or put them out of business
3 - goal is to grow till you get #'2 attention and get a fantastic offer to sell out (that very much does happen too) and then you move on and start something else
It is what it is. I agree that at some point a business can become too big to the point of becoming an unfair monopoly though. That is the point where the government might intervene.... I agree that more competition the better for the customer....
