Living in France, this experience sounds really alien to me. All the workshops i've been involved in have like 2/3 professional suppliers, some more specialized

Living in France, this experience sounds really alien to me. All the workshops i've been involved in have like 2/3 professional suppliers, some more specialized in different product categories, and usually all it takes is a phone call and a car trip to get your parts. How it works is the supplier has predefined lengths / surfaces with associated price, and you buy an entire unit but they will cut it however you like. So no, i can't buy a single 0.4m unit, but i can buy an entire 6m unit and have it chopped down to 0.4 units (usually for a small fee). Never had to wait more than 10 minutes to have my units ready. Never involved any secretary spending half an hour determining a price. Admittedly i've never worked with aluminum, but i know people who do that for a living and i've never heard of supply issues. Maybe that's a really US problem that's described in this article? Or maybe my view is skewed because of being close to bigger cities where the suppliers are.