Howdens Kitchen Discount

dunroving

MarcTJTD wrote: »

Nah; Howdens is happy to encourage retail customers despite their marketing as a trade brand. Every kitchen designer (myself included) would much rather sit down with a retail customer and discuss their dream kitchen than sit down with a tradesman and discuss how cheap they can get the gear for.

It's more profitable (more likely to be able to upsell accessories) and a more enjoyable experience for the salesman to sit down with excited and engaged retail customers rather than jaded tradesmen who are primarily looking at the £, not the project.

The inflated RRP is purely so that they can claim to offer huge discounts. People do tend to fall for the illusion that big numbers = big deal, even if intellectually they realise that it's not the case.

I have to comment on the sentence in bold. I wish that during the "dream kitchen" discussion, the customer could be given at least *some* idea of the cost implications of the choices along the way.

At the Howdens branch I went to, there was a little bit of help with this, but often there's not. They had a display of the various door options, in order of cost, for example. Similar for the taps.

Without at least some indication of relative cost, it's too easy to get to the end of the process and be way off budget. You then have to trawl through the various ways in which the cost could drop (e.g., "This sink is half the price of the sink you chose", or "these are the higher-end components, if you want to downshift on them".)

I can't think of any other consumer experience where you have to choose all the bits and pieces, with no idea of the cost of each element, before you learn the final price. It just seems like an unnecessarily frustrating guessing game.

MarcTJTD

dunroving wrote: »

I have to comment on the sentence in bold. I wish that during the "dream kitchen" discussion, the customer could be given at least *some* idea of the cost implications of the choices along the way.

Absolutely agree; and it's especially aggravating when dealing with multiple suppliers offering varying purchase terms; you can't even judge it by the RRP when one supplier has 25% terms and another has 65%.

TELLIT01

dunroving wrote: »

I have to comment on the sentence in bold. I wish that during the "dream kitchen" discussion, the customer could be given at least *some* idea of the cost implications of the choices along the way.

I certainly agree with that. We dealt with the designer and at no point was there any mention that the doors my missus loved were top of the range. I nearly had a heart attack when the initial quote came through. Even the final choice wasn't cheap, but we did include a number of upgrades, on the basis that we don't plan to change the kitchen again, and the previous had lasted around 30 years.

Clive_Woody

The Howdens pricing mess is annoying, but we got them to price match DIY kitchens. The floor goes down in our new kitchen tomorrow and Friday, then it's all done and we are really pleased with how it looks (so far.....).

There were one or two issues with bits that needed to be replaced but it was all done really quickly with no fuss at all. Can't fault Howdens on their customer service.

We didn't go with Howdens for the worksurfaces as our fitter could get 30mm quartz for the price that Howdens charged for 20mm. Again really pleased with how it looks.

While it was all technically done through our fitters account we met with howdens directly to get the design right and we paid them direct too. I suspect as mentioned the trade account bit is "negotiable", but the fact that we used a fitter who fits a lot of their kitchens helped with the discount (at least that's what I like to think).