🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <ckrantz.78.0015E93A@redshift.com>,
Craig Krantz <ckrantz@redshift.com> wrote:
>
>I'd be REAL interested to find out if this company reports the sale to the 
>state of California and pays the tax. 

Trust me, Hallmark is definitely reporting taxes to California.

Hallmark is what's known as an "old boy" distributor.  They've used to dealing
with purchasing departments or other beauracracies.  Their average order
is probably in the multiple-hundred dollar range.  They are not at all
suited to providing a single device to some guy who hasn't been indoctrinated
into the "old boy" distrubutor network. :-)

I agree with the other posters that the original guy can expect to be able
to return one of the two parts that he didn't really order; Hallmark was
at fault for not informing him of their "minimum order" policy and 
just haphazardly deciding they'd ship him two items instead of one.  

The $50 restocking fee is not unusual for an old boy.  These places often
are relatively inefficient (and this is not entirely their own fault), and
it often does cost unGodly amounts of money for them to re-stock things or
process orders.

The way things work with old boy distributors is that you as an engineer
or a purchasing department cultivate a relationship with the distributor's
sales people, who'll come and visit your company on regular occasion to
tell you what new and exciting things they're selling.  You can usually
get free samples from these sales people if there really is a chance you're
going to use the parts in a future design.  When that happens, your company,
which is hopefully used to dealing with distributors, calls up Hallmark and
orders a 100 widgets, and everyone's happy.  But the wheels turn very slowly,
you see.

One other thing: the original poster mentioned that the regulator didn't come
with instructor.  Well, no duh.  Hallmark really wants you to buy 100 
regulators and know how to use them yourself.  If you're deemed worthy,
Hallmark has salespeople who will come out and give you the data books for
any parts you say you're interested in.  This is how you figure out how
to use a given part.

You might ask the sales departments to transfer you to someone who handles
data book distribution and try to sweet-talk them into FAXing or mailing
you a copy of the data sheet for the part you have, which may help you
figure things out, but which certainly won't say "Remove Pentium, place
regulator in position U3, blah, blah."

					---Joel Kolstad