General Bidness Etiquette Query

This is a good reminder that I probably need to respond faster. Of course it goes both ways, where I can go a week or more without receiving a response. I don't always expect one due to timezones, different work schedules, unknown holidays, people working reduced hours due to Vid.

In all seriousness, though, this has been going on for some time. I'm just a lowly grunt at a big company, so not sure about the degradation of etiquette in high level business settings, but I can speak a LOT to dealing with construction/service trades, as I've been doing an awful lot of that since buying my crumbling-to-pieces house and rebuilding my burned-down shop.

It absolutely amazes me how rarely a contractor will even call back at all, let alone be prompt. Rarely will somebody show up on time and be professional. And a lot of times, when they do show up, the bid is stupid high. It's a seller's market right now for construction/industrial services, and the amount of respect paid to you, the customer, reflects this. They'll get to you when they get to you, and you'll be as thankful for their benevolence as you would if they were Kirk Herbstreit. And you'll take their $6500 bid for eight man-hours of plumbing and $100 in materials and you'll like it.

More recently, I've been hunting auctions, trying to pick the carcass of a newly deceased machine shop for a cheap VMC. As recently as a couple of years ago, even a 15 year old machine like this would typically sell for at least $20K. Now they can be found at auction for under half that. The problem? Rigging and transporting 11,000 lbs. of cast iron and sensitive electronics isn't cheap. As in, costs more than the machine "not cheap" in some cases. I've requested rigging quotes from six different outfits in the last month. ONE has gotten back to me, and with that one it's been three days and counting waiting for a simple bid. What do they care, though, when the gal tells me right there on the phone that they're so busy moving shit around from dead shops right now that they can get to it when they get to it and charge whatever they want?

Not to ramble on like a woman at a board meeting, but my theory is that we're seeing the delayed effect of the transition from phone to text/email communication finally hitting. People are now used to a lack of immediacy in communication. It's normal. In the days when you had to pick up the phone or meet face to face, people were used to communicating in real time. Now, it's a text message or email, and you can get to it when you get to it. This has finally trickled up to business, as businesses are increasingly staffed/owned by people who grew up knowing nothing else. I have a distant millennial friend with whom I communicate only via IM. He gives me shit all the time for typing things like, "I'm sorry it took so long to get back to you" or, "I'm busy right now, but I'll get back to you in a bit." Or even, "I've gotta run, I'll catch you later."

The response is always something like, "Dude: you don't have to say that. It's IM. I'm not sitting here waiting for your response or something."

I think that's the business-to-customer or even business-to-business relationship in a nutshell these days.