Having recently moved from Leafy Surburbia to Loftdom, I found myself in the market for industrial shelving. This is bare-basics shelving, metal and bolts, the kind that looks good in a spacious factory that has been converted into residential accommodation.
The Yellow Pages lists any number of suppliers, many in Germiston and surrounds. It is easy to get lost in the industrial unberbelly that traverses much of the south, east and west of Jo’burg. An hour and a half later I was still driving backwards and forwards, up and down streets and past business premises with Big Names such as Barlow, Haggie and Rand.
My first choice supplier was shut for the day, it being a Jewish holiday, but just down the road was a major source of shelving. Here was industrial shelving nirvana: a great showroom, a team of sales assistants and a range of products in different colours and options. You could have a clip-on version or the more traditional nut-and-bolt shelving.
A cheerful assistant ran expertly through a spreadsheet of options and produced two nice computer printouts of prices for the clip-on or nut-and-bolt. Along the way, she even shared a risqué joke that her mother had sent her by SMS.
But there was a catch and, to be fair, she made this very clear in the first case: for love or money they would not sell me any industrial shelving. At least until next year. This is because they can’t meet the orders they have at present. The factory has run out of capacity.
Here must be one of the best proxies of economic activity there is. You can’t run factories without industrial shelving, neither can you run wholesale or retail operations. Sustained economic growth is causing us to run out of shelving.
There are some things I am prepared to wait until next year for, but shelving is not one of them. Could alternative suppliers be recommended?
The assistant was happy to recommend the competition, telling me I’d find a similar picture wherever I tried. What about second-hand? I was given a phone number, which I tried several times, leaving messages that were not returned.
Next door is another Big Name in the industrial-shelving business. It also had a great showroom with exactly what I was looking for. The two sales assistants gave me a knowing look as if to say, “Don’t even think about asking for any of this stuff,” and recommended I try a third outlet, which was next door.
The third outlet gets its shelving from the first outfit, but gave directions to a fourth place that might be able to help me. Yes, they could make it up.
Something did not ring true about this offer, though, perhaps because they had no showroom and there was no sense of any industrial shelving actually being made there. For all I knew they would have called the cheerful assistant with my order, only to be told to call back in January. I was feeling desperate, but decided to press on.
Nearby was a mini industrial park where people were making kitchen cupboards and the like. One had some used shelving units outside. Where had I been, they wanted to know, they have had any number of units for sale for months now, the result of downsizing. But these had just been sold that very morning.
They could see the beginnings of desperation in my eyes, and presumably a good deal, so offered to sell me two units that they were using at present in their home. We swapped contact details.
As I was leaving, a woman came running after me, calling. She was with the party who had bought the shelving that morning and slipped me her business card out of sight of the fellow who wanted to sell me the stuff from his house. I was sure now that I was entering the Industrial Shelving Underground. I had found a fixer, a source of supply. The card was a business address across town, still in the industrial belt that sells second-hand or refurbished shelving.
It took three visits to the shop before I managed to secure a few units. There was the strong sense that, even though I had placed my order, other more desperate people were somehow able to jump the queue.
On the third visit my order was still not ready but, fortunately, some used shelves had just arrived. They lay on the pavement, looking pathetic. Frustrated, I was about to tell the supplier to stick his shelving when it occurred to me that these few shelves were possibly all that was left in the whole of Jo’burg. The shelving, refurbished, was delivered later that day.
My renovated units cost about R300. This was for five shelves, 45cm deep and about a metre wide. Bolted together, the unit is a little under 2m high. The fancy clip-on unit that was unavailable to me had five shelves, each about 45cm deep and a metre wide, and cost R2 500. The simpler nut-and-bolt equivalent, which was also unavailable to me, cost R1 700.
Industrial shelving is not only a barometer of economic activity, it is also an input cost to the manufacturing process. The government is worried that high input costs are curtailing growth, exports and jobs.
At the prices quoted to me, industrial shelving is a high input cost. In comparison, Google shopping engine Froogle lists similar units that are available, new, in the United States. Prices start at about $100 (R650) and go as high as $230 (R1 500), but most are below $150 (R1 000).