Your Supplier’s Price Hike Isn’t About ‘The Market’
The email hangs there, suspended in the blueish light of the monitor. A faint, high-frequency hum from the server rack down the hall is the only sound. The words themselves-‘due to ongoing global market fluctuations’-feel less like information and more like a physical weight. There’s a dull, familiar pressure building behind my eyes. It isn’t the hot flash of anger, not yet. It’s the heavier, colder feeling of resignation. Another un-schedulable fire to put out. Another meticulously planned budget to tear apart and re-juggle. Another conversation where I will show up holding a pair of deuces while my counterpart holds the entire deck.
We are conditioned to accept it. This phrase, this excuse, is the business equivalent of the weather. It’s an act of God. An unknowable, impossibly powerful deity that demands periodic sacrifice, and this quarter, it has chosen your profit margin. The supplier, we’re told, is just the humble messenger, forced to deliver the bad news. They send a boilerplate apology attached to a 26% price increase. What can you possibly do? For years, I believed the answer was absolutely nothing. I genuinely thought this was the unavoidable cost of doing business, the natural friction of a complex, globalized world.
That belief was one of the most expensive mistakes I’ve ever made, not in a single invoice, but over a decade of passive, exhausted acceptance.
I remember one case with a component supplier out of Malaysia. They hit us with
