New York City Schools Pay Big Markup for Supplies

The New York Sun reports:

Despite buying for 1.1 million students, custodians at New York City public schools are forced to pay more for supplies than a regular consumer walking into a local hardware store.

Straightjacketed by a city contract that requires them to spend their supply budget with a single merchant, the custodians pay in some cases hundreds of dollars more for paper towels, hand soap, batteries, trash cans, jigsaws, and even snow shovels.

Through the company's two approved catalogs, a sheet of Plexiglass costs $224.54. But a custodian could buy the same sheet for just $125 at Dunrite Glass & Windows at 106th Street and Lexington Avenue. Even Ace Hardware and a Lower Manhattan Home Depot can beat the catalog, charging, respectively, $12.25 for a snow shovel listed at $16.97 and $169.99 for a jigsaw listed at $187.

Custodians said the company, Strategic Distributors Inc., a so-called integrated supplier based in Bristol, Pa., will locate items not listed in its catalogs, but the legwork can be costly. When a custodian who supplied invoice records to The New York Sun asked SDI last month how much it would cost to replace batteries for a floor scrubber, the company's quote, $1,663, was nearly $600 higher than the one a local supplier sent, $1,016.

"Quite a lucrative deal they have," the president and business manager of the city's custodian union, Robert Troeller, said. Mr. Troeller's union, Local 891 at the International Union of Operating Engineers, represents custodian engineers, who act as superintendents for each of the city's 1,200 school buildings, managing the school's supply and physical plant budgets.

Would you want these people to run health care?