From: Sil Horwitz (silh@earthlink.net)
Date: 05/26/00-11:21:03 PM Z
At 2000/05/27 11:25 AM -0400, Sandy King wrote:
>Actually there appears to be very little difference in price between
potassium >carbonate and sodium carbonate, if you buy from places like
Formulary, Artcraft and >Bryant Laboratory. I just compared prices of the
two carbonates in recent catalogs >from these suppliers and they are
virtually the same for the two forms of the carbonate.
That's because those companies are serving a very specialized market and
the cost of the chemical is minor compared to the handling expense.
Commercial suppliers, selling chemicals in large quantities, show
considerable difference in prices of the two compounds. The same is true
for lab purity chemicals, which we don't need. As an example of what I
mean, Photographers Formulary charges the same price for 100g of either
one, but if you go to the 10 lb quantity, the price is double for the pot
carbonate (and if you went to carload quantities, the differential would be
much greater). (To see what I mean about packaging being a large part of
the cost for us, for pot carbonate the per pound price in 10 lb pkg is the
same as the price for 100 grams! The difference is even greater for sodium
carbonate, where a pound is $1.18 in 50 lb container, but a 100 gram bottle
- roughly one-fifth of a pound - is $3.50.) At one time I tried to do a
mail order business in selling chemicals and the cost of packaging (a small
dealer has to buy bottles in small quantities, which is expensive), special
handling for shipping, etc, made me so non-competitive that even if I could
have gotten the chemicals for free, I couldn't meet the prices of the
specialist companies.
Dick Sullivan - if you're peeking, I'm sure you could add a lot more to
this! And it is pertinent to this list, because the major part of our
expenses is in the chemicals.
Sil Horwitz, FPSA
Technical Editor, PSA Journal
teched@psa-photo.org
silh@earthlink.net
Visit http://www.psa-photo.org/
Personal page: http://home.earthlink.net/~silh/
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