The $30 Washer Problem: How Skilled Trades Stop Overpaying for Parts That Don't Exist Yet

Here's a scene that plays out in every trade in the country. A commercial plumber needs a run of custom backing plates, or a batch of non-standard bushings, or a discontinued bracket for a 20-year-old boiler. The OEM part is obsolete. The distributor wants a four-week lead time and a 500-unit minimum. So the plumber either over-orders, waits, or improvises — and eats the cost either way.

Multiply that across a year. According to the UK-based RS and CIPS Indirect Procurement Report, the process of buying low-value maintenance and operations items costs, on average, twice as much as the products themselves — because the time spent sourcing, comparing, and chasing parts dwarfs the price tag. The 2025 edition of the same research found businesses were juggling an average of 92 separate suppliers for maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) spend (the 2026 edition puts it at 83), with the share using more than 250 suppliers rising from 6% in 2023 to 15% in the 2025 survey.

That fragmentation is the leak. And it's exactly what a local fabrication marketplace is built to seal.

The job that used to be impossible to quote

Picture the washer example. A facilities contractor needs 10,000 metal washers in a non-standard thickness. Traditionally, that means a national distributor, a minimum order, freight, and a markup stacked at every link in the chain. Industry reporting on B2B wholesale notes broker commissions often run 10–20% on what is essentially low-risk intermediary work — money that never touches the person who actually makes or moves the part.

On The Spool List, that same contractor posts the spec to the marketplace. A maker with an idle CNC, a metal stamping setup, or a water-jet posts a bid. The contractor sees price, lead time, and distance in one view. The middleman markup evaporates. The maker — who was sitting on unused machine hours anyway — books a job that never would have reached them.

This is not theoretical. Xometry, the publicly traded on-demand manufacturing marketplace, reported marketplace revenue of $630 million for full-year 2025, up 30% year over year, with active buyers reaching roughly 85,600 by Q1 2026 — a 20% jump in a single year. The model of "post a part spec, get matched to fabrication capacity" is already a proven category. What's missing is a version built for local, small-batch, multi-discipline work — the jobs too small for Xometry's enterprise focus and too custom for a catalog distributor.

Where the savings actually come from

Three structural costs disappear when sourcing goes local and direct:

1. The intermediary margin. No broker layer means the 10–20% broker commission stays in the buyer's pocket or splits between buyer and maker.
2. Freight and lead time. Shorter distances mean less freight and shorter waits. A part made 15 miles away can ship same-day, not same-month.
3. Over-ordering. When minimums vanish, the contractor orders 10,000 washers — not 50,000 to hit a price break — freeing the capital that would otherwise sit dead on a shelf.

What this means for the trades

The skilled trades are simultaneously the most squeezed and the best positioned to benefit. The U.S. faces an estimated 1.4 million unfilled jobs across seven skilled-trade categories by 2030, representing an estimated $325.6 billion in lost GDP each year if the gap persists. Trades aren't short on demand — they're short on time and hands. Anything that removes hours of procurement friction per week is a direct productivity gain.

And the relationship runs both ways. A plumber who also owns a 3D printer or a small CNC isn't just a buyer on the platform — they're a maker who can fill other trades' jobs during slow weeks. The marketplace turns every workshop into both a customer and a supplier, and keeps the money circulating inside the local economy instead of exporting it to a national distributor.

Your Procurement Process Costs More Than Your Parts

If you had to guess what a $4 part actually costs your business, you'd probably say $4. You'd be counting only about a third of what it really costs.

The RS and CIPS Indirect Procurement Report found that the soft costs of sourcing, ordering and inventory can account for 60–70% of the total cost of ownership of maintenance and operations items, with only 30–40% being the product itself — so the process often costs about twice as much as the item. The purchase order, the supplier hunt, the price comparison, the follow-up calls, the receiving and reconciliation — that overhead is the iceberg beneath every cheap part you buy.

And it compounds. Indirect spend — all the non-production purchasing that keeps a business running — can represent 10, 15, or even 18 percent of revenue in some industries, according to McKinsey. Much of it is fragmented across dozens of suppliers. RS's 2025 report put the average at 92 maintenance-and-operations suppliers, with the share of businesses juggling more than 250 jumping from 6% in 2023 to 15%.

That fragmentation isn't a filing problem. It's a profit leak.

Where the money actually goes

Three structural costs hide inside "just ordering a part":

• Search cost. Finding who can supply a non-standard item means juggling relationships across multiple distributors and brokers — phone calls, emails, stock checks. That administrative overload is time stolen from actual work.
• Markup cost. Every intermediary in the chain takes a cut — money that never reaches whoever actually makes or moves the part.
• Inventory cost. When suppliers impose minimums, you over-order to hit a price break, and the excess sits as dead capital on a shelf.

The consolidation everyone's chasing

The procurement world already knows this is broken. The 2026 RS Indirect Procurement Report shows the average supplier count falling — from 92 to 83 — as organizations actively consolidate: half of respondents (50%) cited cutting the number of suppliers as one of the tactics they're using to cope with cost pressure.

The problem is that consolidation usually means signing bigger contracts with bigger distributors — trading one kind of rigidity for another. You get fewer invoices, but you're still locked into catalog pricing, minimums, and lead times you don't control.

A different kind of consolidation

The Spool List consolidates differently: not into one big supplier, but into one interface over many local makers. You post a job once and competing bids come to you, each showing price, lead time, and distance. You collapse the fragmented supplier base and the markup-laden broker chain into a single place — without surrendering flexibility to a national distributor.

The reverse-auction structure — buyer posts requirements, suppliers respond with bids — has been used in business purchasing since the 1990s, in categories ranging from contract manufacturing to MRO. It puts the buyer in control and makes the true local price visible.

Your Procurement Process Costs More Than Your Parts

If you had to guess what a $4 part actually costs your business, you'd probably say $4. You'd be counting only about a third of what it really costs.

The RS and CIPS Indirect Procurement Report found that the soft costs of sourcing, ordering and inventory can account for 60–70% of the total cost of ownership of maintenance and operations items, with only 30–40% being the product itself — so the process often costs about twice as much as the item. The purchase order, the supplier hunt, the price comparison, the follow-up calls, the receiving and reconciliation — that overhead is the iceberg beneath every cheap part you buy.

And it compounds. Indirect spend — all the non-production purchasing that keeps a business running — can represent 10, 15, or even 18 percent of revenue in some industries, according to McKinsey. Much of it is fragmented across dozens of suppliers. RS's 2025 report put the average at 92 maintenance-and-operations suppliers, with the share of businesses juggling more than 250 jumping from 6% in 2023 to 15%.

That fragmentation isn't a filing problem. It's a profit leak.

Where the money actually goes

Three structural costs hide inside "just ordering a part":

• Search cost. Finding who can supply a non-standard item means juggling relationships across multiple distributors and brokers — phone calls, emails, stock checks. That administrative overload is time stolen from actual work.
• Markup cost. Every intermediary in the chain takes a cut — money that never reaches whoever actually makes or moves the part.
• Inventory cost. When suppliers impose minimums, you over-order to hit a price break, and the excess sits as dead capital on a shelf.

The consolidation everyone's chasing

The procurement world already knows this is broken. The 2026 RS Indirect Procurement Report shows the average supplier count falling — from 92 to 83 — as organizations actively consolidate: half of respondents (50%) cited cutting the number of suppliers as one of the tactics they're using to cope with cost pressure.

The problem is that consolidation usually means signing bigger contracts with bigger distributors — trading one kind of rigidity for another. You get fewer invoices, but you're still locked into catalog pricing, minimums, and lead times you don't control.

A different kind of consolidation

The Spool List consolidates differently: not into one big supplier, but into one interface over many local makers. You post a job once and competing bids come to you, each showing price, lead time, and distance. You collapse the fragmented supplier base and the markup-laden broker chain into a single place — without surrendering flexibility to a national distributor.

The reverse-auction structure — buyer posts requirements, suppliers respond with bids — has been used in business purchasing since the 1990s, in categories ranging from contract manufacturing to MRO. It puts the buyer in control and makes the true local price visible.

Your Procurement Process Costs More Than Your Parts

If you had to guess what a $4 part actually costs your business, you'd probably say $4. You'd be counting only about a third of what it really costs.

The RS and CIPS Indirect Procurement Report found that the soft costs of sourcing, ordering and inventory can account for 60–70% of the total cost of ownership of maintenance and operations items, with only 30–40% being the product itself — so the process often costs about twice as much as the item. The purchase order, the supplier hunt, the price comparison, the follow-up calls, the receiving and reconciliation — that overhead is the iceberg beneath every cheap part you buy.

And it compounds. Indirect spend — all the non-production purchasing that keeps a business running — can represent 10, 15, or even 18 percent of revenue in some industries, according to McKinsey. Much of it is fragmented across dozens of suppliers. RS's 2025 report put the average at 92 maintenance-and-operations suppliers, with the share of businesses juggling more than 250 jumping from 6% in 2023 to 15%.

That fragmentation isn't a filing problem. It's a profit leak.

Where the money actually goes

Three structural costs hide inside "just ordering a part":

• Search cost. Finding who can supply a non-standard item means juggling relationships across multiple distributors and brokers — phone calls, emails, stock checks. That administrative overload is time stolen from actual work.
• Markup cost. Every intermediary in the chain takes a cut — money that never reaches whoever actually makes or moves the part.
• Inventory cost. When suppliers impose minimums, you over-order to hit a price break, and the excess sits as dead capital on a shelf.

The consolidation everyone's chasing

The procurement world already knows this is broken. The 2026 RS Indirect Procurement Report shows the average supplier count falling — from 92 to 83 — as organizations actively consolidate: half of respondents (50%) cited cutting the number of suppliers as one of the tactics they're using to cope with cost pressure.

The problem is that consolidation usually means signing bigger contracts with bigger distributors — trading one kind of rigidity for another. You get fewer invoices, but you're still locked into catalog pricing, minimums, and lead times you don't control.

A different kind of consolidation

The Spool List consolidates differently: not into one big supplier, but into one interface over many local makers. You post a job once and competing bids come to you, each showing price, lead time, and distance. You collapse the fragmented supplier base and the markup-laden broker chain into a single place — without surrendering flexibility to a national distributor.

The reverse-auction structure — buyer posts requirements, suppliers respond with bids — has been used in business purchasing since the 1990s, in categories ranging from contract manufacturing to MRO. It puts the buyer in control and makes the true local price visible.

Sources

• RS, "What is MRO procurement" (citing the RS/CIPS Indirect Procurement Report): https://uk.rs-online.com/web/content/mro/procurement-strategy/what-is-mro-procurement
• RS, "Understanding MRO Costs" (citing the 2025 Indirect Procurement Report): https://uk.rs-online.com/web/content/mro/procurement-strategy/understanding-mro-costs
• CIPS, "RS releases 2026 Indirect Procurement Report: 'Uncertainty Driving Efficiency'": https://www.cips.org/about-us/news/rs-2026-indirect-procurement-report-uncertainty-driving-efficiency
• SmartScout, "The End of the Middleman: How B2B Marketplaces are Disrupting the Traditional Wholesale Broker Model" (Oct 16, 2025): https://www.smartscout.com/blog/b2b-marketplaces
• Xometry, "Xometry Reports Record Fourth Quarter and Strong Full Year 2025 Results" (Feb 24, 2026): https://investors.xometry.com/news-releases/news-release-details/xometry-reports-record-fourth-quarter-and-strong-full-year-2025
• Xometry, "Xometry Reports Record First Quarter 2026 Results" (May 7, 2026): https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/05/07/3289838/0/en/xometry-reports-record-first-quarter-2026-results.html
• F.W. Webb / Bring Back the Trades, "Closing the Skilled Trades Gap Could Unlock $325.6 billion in GDP Nationwide" (Feb 5, 2026): https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/closing-the-skilled-trades-gap-could-unlock-325-6-billion-in-gdp-nationwide-302680119.html
• RS — Understanding MRO Costs (citing the RS and CIPS Indirect Procurement Report)
• CIPS — RS releases 2026 Indirect Procurement Report: "Uncertainty Driving Efficiency"
• McKinsey — Rethinking the balance in outsourcing indirect procurement
• Designing Buildings Wiki — Reverse auction
• Wikipedia — Reverse auction