News

Are Firewood Crates Getting Smaller?

Posted on by delta

Over the last few years we have noticed a trend within the online firewood industry were many companies are shrinking the sizes of their large or full crates.

We have seen our main competitors reduce the size of their large crates by up to 35%, meaning the end customer who may not realise the change of dimensions will not be expecting to receive a crate much smaller than previous years.

Not only does this make the logs more expensive when it may appear cheaper, but means customers must purchase again later in the season when their logs pile runs out much sooner than normal.

Why are companies shrinking their large crates?

There are 2 reasons:

  1. Reducing the size while still referring to the crate as large/full lends to the illusion that it’s better value for money, allowing companies engaging in such tactics to compete with each other in a never-ending war of reducing the size of their crates and trying to appear cheaper than each other
  2. Costs of raw materials are rising – it is a fact as many of our customers will know that the cost of sourcing raw materials and producing kiln dried logs does increase somewhat each year, as demand for properly kiln dried logs grows. By reducing the size of crates, companies can appear to still be retaining the same value as previous years when in fact this is not the case.

Why we will never shrink the size of our large crates

We feel both these reasons for reducing the size of large crates are misleading and can only lead to unhappy and confused customers.

We know those of you who purchase large crates do so for the sheer volume of logs and value it represents in comparison to smaller crates, and expect the same size crate each year.

Ultimately we believe in transparency and if rises in our production costs dictate a small price increase then we would much rather be honest about this and adjust the price than shrink our large crates.

We encourage customers who are tempted by or see cheaper priced large crates elsewhere to always check the quoted dimensions against ours.

— Peter
Founder
Logs For Sale Ltd