Same spec. Very different prices.
Public bids are one of the most disciplined pricing environments this industry has — written specs, sealed competition, published results. So we took 23 public waterworks bid tabulations from 16 cities and water authorities across 12 states, and measured how far apart competing distributors priced the identical line item.
How far apart do competing distributors price the same part?
median spread between the low and high quote for the identical line item — across 2,987 head-to-head lines.
of lines show competing quotes more than 25% apart. One in five is more than 50% apart.
of lines: the high quote is more than double the low — same spec, same sealed bid.
This isn't one messy product line. Median spread by family: brass 13%, hydrants 15%, pipe 17%, valves 17%, repair clamps 17%, fittings 18%. The dispersion is structural, not a category quirk.
Four lines, verified against the source PDFs
Every figure below was checked line-by-line against the original public tabulation. The copper-tubing line alone is a $263,700 swing on one year's volume — commodity metal, same SKU, five distributors bidding the same day.
The same part, a different price in the next town
We matched identical product specs across entities (186 conservative clusters). The same item's best available price differs by a median of 1.4× from one municipality to the next, and 23% of matched items differ by more than 2×. The cleanest example is same-window: a 6″×1″ double-strap tap saddle drew a $25.21 low bid in Tuscaloosa, AL (2021) and $101.10 in Rowlett, TX (2022) — 4× apart, one year apart, so inflation can't explain it.
Honest caveat: this corpus spans 2016–2026, through the 2021–2023 inflation wave, and delivered bid prices embed each buyer's freight, terms, and volume. Restricted to bids within two years of each other, the median gap is 1.15× — but that subset is dominated by three large 2025 authorities that price near each other. The truth sits between the two, and the 4× saddle is same-window.
When the spec is loose, prices scatter
Every extreme outlier we found traced to one of two causes — and both are the same lesson. One vendor priced copper pipe per foot while another priced it per ten-foot stick. One read a 6-foot nipple as 6-inch. One bundled a fitting's ring into an accessory pack and left the standalone line blank. Municipal buyers catch some of this because sealed bids sit side-by-side in a public table. A distributor's quote desk has no such table — the same unit confusion, spec drift, and keying errors flow straight into customer quotes, invisibly.
If public bids vary this much, what does your book look like?
These are sealed bids with written specs and published results — the disciplined case. Now picture the thousands of negotiated, rep-priced, relationship-priced quotes in your own book, where nobody publishes the tabulation. We measured exactly that inside one $454M distributor's full year of quotes: the same SKU sold to 30 customers at −43% to +94% margin, and $9.5M of recoverable margin. See that study →
See it in your own data — free.
Send a read-only export of your catalog and a year of quotes. We'll send back your below-cost lines, your under-margin revenue, and your most inconsistently priced SKUs. No system access, no obligation.
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