just stained glass

It isn't JUST the retailers you piss off. It's pretty much everybody in the whole glass business, including manufacturers, importers, artisans, and hobbiests.

Your entire business model, if you can call it that, is pure self-serving nonsense.

windows/panels.

Ah, hell, Will, we're just having alittle fun at Dennis's expense and get carried away, or maybe not... But if you have a glass curious type question, fire it out there, nobody will jump you.

Nonsense. Absolute total nonsense. By your logic, then, I should pay retail pricing for the materials on any gifts I might make?

All you are trying to do is lend some artifical credibility to a bunch of basement bandits and wannabes.

The cost of the glass and metal in any stained glass project is a very small percentage of the selling price...that is, if the project is actually being built by a real professional artisan. Me spending $30-50 more for supplies on a $1000 sale is certainly worth the convenience of having a local source for that odd piece of glass or whatever I need on short notice.

I'm far from a hobbyist...and I use retailers for virtually all of my supplies. Know why? Because when that retailer gets an inquiry on a major repair or restoration or for new work that they can't handle, I get a phone call. So, I spend a few extra bucks a month keeping the local economy going, and it comes back to me in spades. When I walk into a store, they know me. I don't have to give them a customer number and a password and wait for two friggin' weeks for some bozo to process an order.

No, Dennis. Wholesale is for people who regularly purchase reasonable and case quantities and know good business relations depend on both parties, so they know how the business works and what the terminology might be. The savings from this regularity for the source results in savings for the customer. Retail is for answering all the questions from people who want to spend as little as possible on just enough glass and other supplies for a single project, including the (fortunately) relatively rare people who believe that if they break a piece of glass they should get a free replacement and those who demand obsiquiousness ["You are the employee and I am the customer and don't give me that attitude."] Somewhere in between are the people who make more stuff than the hobbiests but not so much as the professionals but think, more or less accurately, that they should get the advantages of the latter. The more obnoxious ones think that all suppliers should somehow be forced to the standard of the more polite ones that treat them as wholesale customers.