11 ms·

McMaster is great. This article is also completely glossing over another reason to use them: Their shipping is somehow insanely fast. Almost everything is nex

McMaster is great. This article is also completely glossing over another reason to use them: Their shipping is somehow insanely fast. Almost everything is next-day delivery, even for standard shipping. They've somehow got their logistics COMPLETELY nailed. I believe they have their own agreements with USPS/FedEx/etc... McMaster is generally not the cheapest, but they're almost always the fastest and the easiest. Machining/industry runs on McMaster.

thereisnospork 4y ago
Indeed, even in rural parts of the country orders placed by 4-6pm still arrive next day[0]. This saves calendar days on projects; its often not till 4 or 5 that the full list of missing fittings/parts/tools comes together. [0]Sometimes you need to spring for air shipping if you are in the sticks.
pGuitar 4y ago
> Almost everything is next-day delivery, Could it be that you live next to one of their warehouses? On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  I'm ~12 miles from one, and they are as fast as amazon
  - pGuitar 4y ago
    I would consider 12 miles to be right next to it from a shipping perspective... I.E., With USPS you can pretty much assume that you are going to get a letter next-day if it comes from your state
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  > On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member. Sounds like a conflict of interest if they literally start transit then delay at some point. Like maybe retailers shouldn't be able to own shipping
  - lmm 4y ago
    Plenty of dedicated shipping companies do exactly the same thing (if you don't pay for next day then they'll deliberately delay it so it takes 5 days or whatever you paid for), it's got nothing to do with being owned by a retailer or not.
    - paulmd 4y ago
      this definitely used to be a thing until like... early 2010s. Back then I completely recall watching tracking for some items and they'd accept it and run it a couple hops and then... it'd just sit for 3 days or whatever. Fedex said it was gonna be 5 business days? Then don't expect to see it in less than 5 business days. I've seen both Fedex and UPS do it, but in some places it seemed like one or the other. I don't see it all that much anymore though. Definitely post-covid but tbh it's really been years since I've seen it. I can't tell how much of that is vs me moving away from a rural home (might be more likely to attempt "batching" deliveries in rural areas due to distance) vs an actual change in behavior here. It may also be the shift to JIT logistics too - you have to have a big warehouse or something to hold them. Even if it's sitting in a trailer somewhere, you still have to have a big lot to hold them. These are costs that are probably not justified for the return of "lol make customers more amicable to pay more for better shipping", the conversion there is ~0% for the most part. The 5-day window is nice for the courier if they need it of course, holiday is madness in the mail business (and payments, retail, etc) from what I know, but if your throughput is significantly lower than your mail volume then you've got problems, so you need to be able to ship it through in 2-3 days on average anyway, and if you can do that... why pay for someplace to hold onto it when we can JIT it right onto a truck? Today it seems like if your shipping drops off for a couple days it's usually lost. I had one package stop tracking and then bounce 100 miles in the wrong direction, another where it stopped tracking and then showed up with box damage, etc, but haven't seen it just hang out like the old days. Amazon, too, will play games with shipping windows... on a thunderbolt hub, they set a delivery date like two weeks out, sold and shipped by amazon. Like a week later I see a ship notice, cool it'll be here soon right? Lol nope, shipped UPS Surepost, so they got their week out of it.
      - 4y ago
- xadhominemx 4y ago
  Compared to Amazon, MMC has a very small number of SKUs, inventory that never goes stale, and prices that are only affordable in the context of B2B transactions. It’s not a comparable service.
  - hardolaf 4y ago
    DigiKey eliminated everything except next day air for small packages some years ago because it was too expensive to have two different SKUs for shipping small orders in their system. B2B is weird.
    - wildzzz 4y ago
      Next day delivery is so common for B2B that many times it's the only way to order. I won a free DMM from Keysight and while it took a month for it to be actually shipped, they shipped it next day from Malaysia to the US when it finally did. Like you guys made me wait weeks for it, I could have waited another week for snail mail.
    - repiret 4y ago
      I made a small order from Digi-Key last month and they offered UPS ground, FedEx ground and USPS. I don’t think I’ve ever not been offered budget shipping from them. But B2B is weird. If I need my employer to ship me something that I’ll use next month, I am hard pressed to get them to ship slower than 2nd day air.
      - lostapathy 4y ago
        Depending on the nature of the business, it’s not uncommon to have negotiated rates for 2nd day shipping that are really good, and essentially retail counter rates for ground. Sometimes that makes 2nd day service cheaper than ground for a lot of destinations. It’s weird.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
      Huh? I order from Digikey all the time and usually I get my packages FedEx because it's the same price as USPS. When USPS is cheaper, I select that because I'm in the same state so it typically gets here the next day anyway.
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  No, they have next day shipping to the whole US.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pGuitar 4y ago
    In other words, standard shipping is always next day?
    - iancmceachern 4y ago
      Exactly
- gruez 4y ago
  >On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member. I'm not so sure about this. I'm not a prime member and I frequently get orders delivered before the estimated delivery date. On the other hand I also see instances where amazon takes suspiciously long to ship something. A charitable explanation might be that their logistics capacity (eg. planes or vans) is limited, so if you're not a prime member you get deprioritized.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    I’m absolutely sure that there is an amazon FIFO for orders that sometimes get delayed days in shipping in order not to build up an unnecessary queue that wouldn’t get emptied for pickup. Probably has a lot to do with them running their own logistics.
  - wildzzz 4y ago
    At my college town around 2013, any prime delivery would always take a day longer than it was supposed to. Saturday delivery wasn't common there at the time so you had to get your order in by Wednesday morning at the latest otherwise you'd be waiting until Monday.
    - jeromegv 4y ago
      Whatever was going on in 2013 is likely not really relevant to how Amazon is operating in 2022. This stuff change drastically.
    - jbb_hn 4y ago
      2013? That’s almost a decade ago.
  - steve_adams_86 4y ago
    Likewise, Amazon almost always delivers to me before their estimate and the estimate is very standard. No one else I order from is doing better. I avoid using Amazon, so as you can imagine, I don’t have a prime membership. It doesn’t seem to matter.
  - 4y ago
- lostapathy 4y ago
  It’s nuts. I’ve had mcmaster packages come from far enough away overnight that there were hardly enough minutes for UPS to drive it this far. But definitely not flown judging by the terminals it went through.
- loansindi 4y ago
  Our office is near their head office/distribution facility. If we order before noon, most stuff shows up same day.
bsder 4y ago
> They've somehow got their logistics COMPLETELY nailed. In addition, you can generally get a useful human on the bloody phone at these companies! The delivery priority is because their customers are losing real money until that shipment of parts to repair their production line comes in. If those parts don't come in when they're supposed to, the people who cut checks are gonna start yelling. However, I tend to prefer MSC (https://www.mscdirect.com/ https://www.mscdirect.com/) over McMaster if I can--especially for machine tooling. It really feels like McMaster really relies on the fact that they can be a "one stop shop" so my experience has been that things tend to be slightly more expensive and with "servicable" quality and with "very good" delivery. However, with a bit of Internet-Fu, you can generally find a better version of the McMaster product at the same price point.
- Blackthorn 4y ago
  MSC is sooooooo expensive for tooling though. Or pretty much anything. Unless you're a business who cut a deal with them so you don't pay list price. I also can't find anything on their website, what a terrible search and catalog functionality they have. Like the opposite of Mcmaster.
  - bsder 4y ago
    Really? Admittedly I haven't used them in earnest since before the plague ... However, a quick look shows them to be dead on price for Mitutoyo dial calipers. Boring heads look a bit more expensive than I remember. Milling bits seem normal price-wise as well. Who is your go to? Machine tooling is always expensive and I'm always looking for places that are cheaper.
    - Blackthorn 4y ago
      They're alright for the Mitutoyo calipers, it looks like. Kurt DX6: $650 on AllIndustrial, $737 on MSC. Bison 7-866-0800 (a 3-jaw 8" forged steel chuck that I happen to own): $1090 through USA Bison retailers like Ajax, $1376 through MSC. I bought multiple Bison chucks through a similar site to Ajax: www.lathe-chucks.com (extremely old school web design, person owns several sites that sell different tooling, way better prices than MSC though you sometimes have to email for a quote). Don't even get me started on their "value line" which is their Taiwanese or Chinese imports, only you get some intense MSC markup to go along with it vs when you buy the same item from a site like AllIndustrial.
s0rce 4y ago
You can get same day in some areas. We usually get next day in Reno.
morcheeba 4y ago
I'll second that. I ordered an 8-foot-long aluminum bar for $25, which, at the time, was too long to ship with traditional shippers. So, a semi trailer showed up at my door. Shipping cost $8.
- anonu 4y ago
  How can they make money doing that?
  - morcheeba 4y ago
    No idea. I talked with the truck driver, and he said we was being paid way more than $8 for the delivery. I used my company account, so I guess they're willing to take a loss on some orders and make it up on others.
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    Next time he’ll buy $20 worth of bolts and pay $80.
    - rickdangerous1 4y ago
      And thats ok.
    - wlesieutre 4y ago
      What's a good place for well priced bolts if I'm not worried about next day shipping but need them to not be made of pot metal?
      - elil17 4y ago
        Where are you finding pot metal bolts? Your best option should be anything from Ace/Home Depot/Lowes. The matte finish ones are zinc galvanized, that’s just the protective coating. They are made of carbon steel and are graded according to standards set by organizations like SAE. Hardware stores will have grade 2 bolts for the most part (or the metric equivalents). These will be made with weaker steel and will be cut instead of cold rolled. If you’re doing something that needs more strength than that, you can get grade 5 or 8 bolts. These will be cold rolled from higher strength steel and may be tested with a penetrant dye to check for any fractures. You can get those at a hardware store or at many online stores. If you need more strength than that, you’re probably in an aerospace application and I recommend that you don’t ask for advice on HN. If you’re buying a shit-load of bolts (like, more than a thousand of one kind of bolt), then you can go to a wholesale website.
monstertank 4y ago
Do they ship to Australia? Any idea if that is also comparable to Amazon delivery speeds?
- auscad 4y ago
  Probably not. They don’t ship to Canada. Don’t be fooled if you’re able to place an order with a non-US address. I was able to, before getting an email the next day when they realized their mistake.
  - pySSK 4y ago
    Weird – I have been able to order parts for a client in the UK. I've used it mainly for connector harnesses. I love their connector harnesses and I have standardized all my prototypes around them. It sounds expensive at first, but it's cheaper and less annoying than making them myself or hiring someone to do it for me.
  - auxym 4y ago
    They ship to businesses in Canada (you have to open an account with them I think, our purchasing does that), but not individuals.
  - jamincan 4y ago
    We use them all the time here in Mississauga. Generally we're getting next-day delivery (I think they have a warehouse in Cleveland). It's not the cheapest option, but they are great for projects still in development as they almost always have exactly what you're looking for. The customer service is also fantastic.
  - switchbak 4y ago
    They'll ship to Canada (as far as I understand), but only for "serious" clients that make it worth the cost to them. Which is a shame, I'd love to be able to use them.
twarge 4y ago
Central New Jersey: Same day shipping, cheaper than ground: Order before 11, get it after lunch.
- jjk166 4y ago
  They have a distribution center just outside of Trenton that does will-call - I've ordered things at 2pm and picked them up at 4.
beowulfey 4y ago
And on top of that you don’t even need a business account. Individuals get the same service. I’ve ordered hard to find parts like tiny springs for home projects, just a few bucks. It’s amazing.
- Syzygies 4y ago
  Yes. I'm missing an unusual screw from the armrest of my office Ekornes Stressless chair, and the closest Amazon length didn't work. I've seen the Mcmaster website before, but thanks for the reminder! I jumped on it, found the right screw in seconds.
bnug 4y ago
Yeah, if you're in a large metro area (I was about 1 hour from the Atlanta distribution center), they would often ship SAME DAY if you ordered by about 10am. It was amazing, and very convenient during chaotic times when you forgot to order one tiny little piece of hardware that was needed before your custom built tooling could be delivered. This was in 2005 - 2007 timeframe, before Amazon started the 1 day stuff.
systems_glitch 4y ago
Yup, McMaster-Carr and ULINE are well known for usually being next-day on standard shipping! Saves a lot of headaches and projects.
bze12 4y ago
I didn't write about shipping speed since the Amazon standard is now 2 days or less. Yes their shipping speed is great, but it isn't a striking relative advantage, comparing against the rest of e-commerce

thereisnospork 4y ago

Indeed, even in rural parts of the country orders placed by 4-6pm still arrive next day[0]. This saves calendar days on projects; its often not till 4 or 5 that the full list of missing fittings/parts/tools comes together. [0]Sometimes you need to spring for air shipping if you are in the sticks.

pGuitar 4y ago

> Almost everything is next-day delivery, Could it be that you live next to one of their warehouses? On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member.

calvinmorrison 4y ago
I'm ~12 miles from one, and they are as fast as amazon
- pGuitar 4y ago
  I would consider 12 miles to be right next to it from a shipping perspective... I.E., With USPS you can pretty much assume that you are going to get a letter next-day if it comes from your state
paulryanrogers 4y ago
> On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member. Sounds like a conflict of interest if they literally start transit then delay at some point. Like maybe retailers shouldn't be able to own shipping
- lmm 4y ago
  Plenty of dedicated shipping companies do exactly the same thing (if you don't pay for next day then they'll deliberately delay it so it takes 5 days or whatever you paid for), it's got nothing to do with being owned by a retailer or not.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    this definitely used to be a thing until like... early 2010s. Back then I completely recall watching tracking for some items and they'd accept it and run it a couple hops and then... it'd just sit for 3 days or whatever. Fedex said it was gonna be 5 business days? Then don't expect to see it in less than 5 business days. I've seen both Fedex and UPS do it, but in some places it seemed like one or the other. I don't see it all that much anymore though. Definitely post-covid but tbh it's really been years since I've seen it. I can't tell how much of that is vs me moving away from a rural home (might be more likely to attempt "batching" deliveries in rural areas due to distance) vs an actual change in behavior here. It may also be the shift to JIT logistics too - you have to have a big warehouse or something to hold them. Even if it's sitting in a trailer somewhere, you still have to have a big lot to hold them. These are costs that are probably not justified for the return of "lol make customers more amicable to pay more for better shipping", the conversion there is ~0% for the most part. The 5-day window is nice for the courier if they need it of course, holiday is madness in the mail business (and payments, retail, etc) from what I know, but if your throughput is significantly lower than your mail volume then you've got problems, so you need to be able to ship it through in 2-3 days on average anyway, and if you can do that... why pay for someplace to hold onto it when we can JIT it right onto a truck? Today it seems like if your shipping drops off for a couple days it's usually lost. I had one package stop tracking and then bounce 100 miles in the wrong direction, another where it stopped tracking and then showed up with box damage, etc, but haven't seen it just hang out like the old days. Amazon, too, will play games with shipping windows... on a thunderbolt hub, they set a delivery date like two weeks out, sold and shipped by amazon. Like a week later I see a ship notice, cool it'll be here soon right? Lol nope, shipped UPS Surepost, so they got their week out of it.
    - 4y ago
xadhominemx 4y ago
Compared to Amazon, MMC has a very small number of SKUs, inventory that never goes stale, and prices that are only affordable in the context of B2B transactions. It’s not a comparable service.
- hardolaf 4y ago
  DigiKey eliminated everything except next day air for small packages some years ago because it was too expensive to have two different SKUs for shipping small orders in their system. B2B is weird.
  - wildzzz 4y ago
    Next day delivery is so common for B2B that many times it's the only way to order. I won a free DMM from Keysight and while it took a month for it to be actually shipped, they shipped it next day from Malaysia to the US when it finally did. Like you guys made me wait weeks for it, I could have waited another week for snail mail.
  - repiret 4y ago
    I made a small order from Digi-Key last month and they offered UPS ground, FedEx ground and USPS. I don’t think I’ve ever not been offered budget shipping from them. But B2B is weird. If I need my employer to ship me something that I’ll use next month, I am hard pressed to get them to ship slower than 2nd day air.
    - lostapathy 4y ago
      Depending on the nature of the business, it’s not uncommon to have negotiated rates for 2nd day shipping that are really good, and essentially retail counter rates for ground. Sometimes that makes 2nd day service cheaper than ground for a lot of destinations. It’s weird.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
    Huh? I order from Digikey all the time and usually I get my packages FedEx because it's the same price as USPS. When USPS is cheaper, I select that because I'm in the same state so it typically gets here the next day anyway.
iancmceachern 4y ago
No, they have next day shipping to the whole US.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pGuitar 4y ago
  In other words, standard shipping is always next day?
  - iancmceachern 4y ago
    Exactly
gruez 4y ago
>On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member. I'm not so sure about this. I'm not a prime member and I frequently get orders delivered before the estimated delivery date. On the other hand I also see instances where amazon takes suspiciously long to ship something. A charitable explanation might be that their logistics capacity (eg. planes or vans) is limited, so if you're not a prime member you get deprioritized.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  I’m absolutely sure that there is an amazon FIFO for orders that sometimes get delayed days in shipping in order not to build up an unnecessary queue that wouldn’t get emptied for pickup. Probably has a lot to do with them running their own logistics.
- wildzzz 4y ago
  At my college town around 2013, any prime delivery would always take a day longer than it was supposed to. Saturday delivery wasn't common there at the time so you had to get your order in by Wednesday morning at the latest otherwise you'd be waiting until Monday.
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    Whatever was going on in 2013 is likely not really relevant to how Amazon is operating in 2022. This stuff change drastically.
  - jbb_hn 4y ago
    2013? That’s almost a decade ago.
- steve_adams_86 4y ago
  Likewise, Amazon almost always delivers to me before their estimate and the estimate is very standard. No one else I order from is doing better. I avoid using Amazon, so as you can imagine, I don’t have a prime membership. It doesn’t seem to matter.
- 4y ago
lostapathy 4y ago
It’s nuts. I’ve had mcmaster packages come from far enough away overnight that there were hardly enough minutes for UPS to drive it this far. But definitely not flown judging by the terminals it went through.
loansindi 4y ago
Our office is near their head office/distribution facility. If we order before noon, most stuff shows up same day.

bsder 4y ago

> They've somehow got their logistics COMPLETELY nailed. In addition, you can generally get a useful human on the bloody phone at these companies! The delivery priority is because their customers are losing real money until that shipment of parts to repair their production line comes in. If those parts don't come in when they're supposed to, the people who cut checks are gonna start yelling. However, I tend to prefer MSC (https://www.mscdirect.com/ https://www.mscdirect.com/) over McMaster if I can--especially for machine tooling. It really feels like McMaster really relies on the fact that they can be a "one stop shop" so my experience has been that things tend to be slightly more expensive and with "servicable" quality and with "very good" delivery. However, with a bit of Internet-Fu, you can generally find a better version of the McMaster product at the same price point.

Blackthorn 4y ago
MSC is sooooooo expensive for tooling though. Or pretty much anything. Unless you're a business who cut a deal with them so you don't pay list price. I also can't find anything on their website, what a terrible search and catalog functionality they have. Like the opposite of Mcmaster.
- bsder 4y ago
  Really? Admittedly I haven't used them in earnest since before the plague ... However, a quick look shows them to be dead on price for Mitutoyo dial calipers. Boring heads look a bit more expensive than I remember. Milling bits seem normal price-wise as well. Who is your go to? Machine tooling is always expensive and I'm always looking for places that are cheaper.
  - Blackthorn 4y ago
    They're alright for the Mitutoyo calipers, it looks like. Kurt DX6: $650 on AllIndustrial, $737 on MSC. Bison 7-866-0800 (a 3-jaw 8" forged steel chuck that I happen to own): $1090 through USA Bison retailers like Ajax, $1376 through MSC. I bought multiple Bison chucks through a similar site to Ajax: www.lathe-chucks.com (extremely old school web design, person owns several sites that sell different tooling, way better prices than MSC though you sometimes have to email for a quote). Don't even get me started on their "value line" which is their Taiwanese or Chinese imports, only you get some intense MSC markup to go along with it vs when you buy the same item from a site like AllIndustrial.

s0rce 4y ago

You can get same day in some areas. We usually get next day in Reno.

morcheeba 4y ago

I'll second that. I ordered an 8-foot-long aluminum bar for $25, which, at the time, was too long to ship with traditional shippers. So, a semi trailer showed up at my door. Shipping cost $8.

anonu 4y ago
How can they make money doing that?
- morcheeba 4y ago
  No idea. I talked with the truck driver, and he said we was being paid way more than $8 for the delivery. I used my company account, so I guess they're willing to take a loss on some orders and make it up on others.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  Next time he’ll buy $20 worth of bolts and pay $80.
  - rickdangerous1 4y ago
    And thats ok.
  - wlesieutre 4y ago
    What's a good place for well priced bolts if I'm not worried about next day shipping but need them to not be made of pot metal?
    - elil17 4y ago
      Where are you finding pot metal bolts? Your best option should be anything from Ace/Home Depot/Lowes. The matte finish ones are zinc galvanized, that’s just the protective coating. They are made of carbon steel and are graded according to standards set by organizations like SAE. Hardware stores will have grade 2 bolts for the most part (or the metric equivalents). These will be made with weaker steel and will be cut instead of cold rolled. If you’re doing something that needs more strength than that, you can get grade 5 or 8 bolts. These will be cold rolled from higher strength steel and may be tested with a penetrant dye to check for any fractures. You can get those at a hardware store or at many online stores. If you need more strength than that, you’re probably in an aerospace application and I recommend that you don’t ask for advice on HN. If you’re buying a shit-load of bolts (like, more than a thousand of one kind of bolt), then you can go to a wholesale website.

monstertank 4y ago

Do they ship to Australia? Any idea if that is also comparable to Amazon delivery speeds?

auscad 4y ago
Probably not. They don’t ship to Canada. Don’t be fooled if you’re able to place an order with a non-US address. I was able to, before getting an email the next day when they realized their mistake.
- pySSK 4y ago
  Weird – I have been able to order parts for a client in the UK. I've used it mainly for connector harnesses. I love their connector harnesses and I have standardized all my prototypes around them. It sounds expensive at first, but it's cheaper and less annoying than making them myself or hiring someone to do it for me.
- auxym 4y ago
  They ship to businesses in Canada (you have to open an account with them I think, our purchasing does that), but not individuals.
- jamincan 4y ago
  We use them all the time here in Mississauga. Generally we're getting next-day delivery (I think they have a warehouse in Cleveland). It's not the cheapest option, but they are great for projects still in development as they almost always have exactly what you're looking for. The customer service is also fantastic.
- switchbak 4y ago
  They'll ship to Canada (as far as I understand), but only for "serious" clients that make it worth the cost to them. Which is a shame, I'd love to be able to use them.

twarge 4y ago

Central New Jersey: Same day shipping, cheaper than ground: Order before 11, get it after lunch.

jjk166 4y ago
They have a distribution center just outside of Trenton that does will-call - I've ordered things at 2pm and picked them up at 4.

beowulfey 4y ago

And on top of that you don’t even need a business account. Individuals get the same service. I’ve ordered hard to find parts like tiny springs for home projects, just a few bucks. It’s amazing.

Syzygies 4y ago
Yes. I'm missing an unusual screw from the armrest of my office Ekornes Stressless chair, and the closest Amazon length didn't work. I've seen the Mcmaster website before, but thanks for the reminder! I jumped on it, found the right screw in seconds.

bnug 4y ago

Yeah, if you're in a large metro area (I was about 1 hour from the Atlanta distribution center), they would often ship SAME DAY if you ordered by about 10am. It was amazing, and very convenient during chaotic times when you forgot to order one tiny little piece of hardware that was needed before your custom built tooling could be delivered. This was in 2005 - 2007 timeframe, before Amazon started the 1 day stuff.

systems_glitch 4y ago

Yup, McMaster-Carr and ULINE are well known for usually being next-day on standard shipping! Saves a lot of headaches and projects.

bze12 4y ago

I didn't write about shipping speed since the Amazon standard is now 2 days or less. Yes their shipping speed is great, but it isn't a striking relative advantage, comparing against the rest of e-commerce