Latest from Industry Perspectives

Sponsored

99 Years of Electrical Wholesaling Magazine

April 5, 2019
Many of the electrical market’s core building blocks haven’t changed over the years. Let’s look at three of them.

As this magazine counts down to its 100th anniversary in 2020, I was struck by how many things in the industry haven’t changed over the years. 

When I stepped off the elevator on the 36th floor of the McGraw-Hill Building in midtown Manhattan back in Nov. 1982 to begin my job with Electrical Wholesaling as an associate editor, this industry was in many ways a very different business. 

IBM had just launched the personal computer the previous year, and it would be several years before personal computers became commonplace in the industry. Computers eventually replaced many of the more manual processes in distributorships — like the Cardex inventory management system that required writing down every product transaction onto individual file cards that were kept in massive bins — but it’s surprising how many other things remain the same in the business.

As the electrical wholesaling industry’s publication of record for the past 99 years, the pages of this magazine chronicled the people, companies, ideas and technologies that changed the business, as well as the business basics that matter as much today as they did in April 1920 when the magazine’s first issue rolled off the printing press.

Leading up to EW’s 100th anniversary issue next April, we will be looking at the basic building blocks that have supported this industry’s growth and resilience over the years. Let’s look at three of them now.

The electrical industry has proven to be stronger than the many challenges that threatened to replace it over the years. Think back to 1990s, when Home Depot started going after electrical contractors. Anyone who lived through this era won’t forget the howls of outrage every time an electrical manufacturer inked a deal with Home Depot. But an electrical distributor never went out of business because of competition from Big Orange.

Just when the furor over Home Depot started to die down in the late 1990s, the dot-com competitors came onto the scene with big ideas on how the channels of distribution would lead through their websites instead of through the thousands of local distributor branches. Electrical distributors survived this threat, too, once the dot-coms burned through all their cash and their business model never quite worked the way it did on the whiteboards in their Ivy League MBA classrooms. We think the industry will survive Amazon and other online purchasing options, too.

Despite all of the acquisitions, this is still a local business. While updating Electrical Marketing newsletter’s database of distributor acquisitions the other day (available as part of a $99 annual subscription to the newsletter), I was struck by two things — the huge number of acquisitions that have taken place since the 1980s and the fact that in the more than 200 acquisitions listed in this database, the branch networks of the acquired companies have for the most part remained relatively intact.

Look at the distributors that the biggest acquirers purchased in your local market, and then think about how many of the branches of those companies are still operating.  The local branch is one of the basic building blocks of this industry, and despite Amazon’s best efforts to provide alternative purchasing and delivery options, they aren’t going away anytime soon.

It’s still very much a people business. The success or failure of any business in this industry still has just as much to do with how any employee handles their piece of each and every business transaction, as it does the price or technical specifications of the product. A poorly packed order, inaccurate return authorization, out-of-stock item, rude receptionist, counter worker or truck driver, or any one of a hundred other daily customer touches can still blow up a business relationship that took years to build.

I hope you enjoy our coverage over the next few months on the evergreen issues of the electrical industry as the magazine’s editors begin our celebration of Electrical Wholesaling’s 100th anniversary.
 

About the Author

Jim Lucy | Editor-in-Chief of Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing

Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 40 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing newsletter, and as a contributing writer for EC&M magazine During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement.

Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling  and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted with his wife and three sons in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 30 years. 

Sponsored Recommendations