To ask for a discount on a kitchen…

[TheBeaTgoeson1]

Currently working on a renovation project, including the Changing of a kitchen. We are looking at three different suppliers at the moment, Howdens, magnet, and Wren. We have a first appointment this week, and, not that it massively matters, but we are in Derbyshire, and the fitting is not going to be included, we are using a different joiner.

Is it unreasonable to haggle with the prices that we are offered first?

Is that they done thing? I seem to be reading that it is. So far wren kitchens seems the most sales orientated, what kind of haggling should you do, and can anybody who’s done this before offer any advice?

Should we be pitching them up against each other?

I’m struggling a little bit against wasting anybody’s time!! …But also not wanting to be ripped off.

Has anyone recently, i.e. in the last 12 months done the kitchen, and bought it units only? And would be willing to share their price, and any negotiations they had?

Thank you!

If you’re looking for units and appliances only, not fitting, try looking at DIYkitchens - you won’t haggle with them, because they don’t play silly games with prices, just charge you per item like a normal shop. At least compare any quote with them.

handmaid kitchens of christchurch do a short 50% off sale twice a year. You order during that period but the lead time after that is quite long. Near to a year.

So it’s essentially heavy discount for prebooking.

We tried asking Magnet for their best price and the manager's solution was to remove things from the quote. Like the island worktop.

In the end we recreated the design we liked best from DIY Kitchens and got our own fitter. We tweaked the original design a bit, saved well over £10k and we're able to pay for some additional work too. We're in north Derbyshire.

Another vote for DIY Kitchens. We visited their showroom in Pontefract with our Howdens plan and ended up with a full wood kitchen for the same price as Howden's MDF. Would highly recommend.

This is really interesting! They often come up here!

We’ll definately add them to the list!

I replaced all kitchen doors and some units, and had new worktops a year ago from Howdens. I would describe mine as a small kitchen (2 bed flat). I’m in London, and what I did was find a recommended local
kitchen fitter first and then he advised on which company to use. He recommended Howdens and said that he could get everything at a discounted trade rate as he fits so many kitchens.

All the new doors, the several units we replaced and the worktops came to £4.2k

On top of the stuff from Howdens, I bought a fancy new ceramic sink, taps, a Smeg hob, a new ceiling light and had new laminate flooring put down to replace the horrible lino. Fitter also installed under unit lighting. (I didn’t replace any other appliances).

Finally he brought a tiler/decorator in to tile the splashback around cooker and to replace the ugly old tiling around sink and between units and worktop. And then whole kitchen was painted (walls, skirting boards and ceiling).

For all materials and labour, the whole project cost 10k.

I can’t say whether the fitter’s ‘discount’ from Howdens was genuinely passed onto me, as they are very secretive about their pricing, like most kitchen companies.

Thanks @Reliablesource

Another one for diy kitchens. I got a plan from another place - paid John Lewis what was then £50 for a visit and plan - picked the type of kitchen I wanted from diy kitchens and sent them the plan and they sent me a list of everything I needed from them. I think they might even have sent me a link to a basket with it all in, but it was a few years ago so I can’t really remember. I found that really helpful as I found it quite overwhelming trying to work out all the little bits we needed. All came put together so managed to get my builder to reduce cost to fit slightly as didn’t need to build the units. It was much cheaper than the equivalent elsewhere. A couple of the wooden doors weren’t joined well, but they were fine to replace them when I sent them pics. Ten years later it’s still going strong. One thing I would say is the tap I got from there wasn’t very good so next time I would get a tap from elsewhere at greater expense as it was a false economy - it was a few years ago though so they may use different taps now.

Any big ticket item where the sales person is likely to be on commission - kitchen/car/furniture/jewellery/large electronics etc - always haggle. I used to work in sales and only mugs paid the full price.

I get it that it's embarrassing for us Brits but just asking "is that the best price you can do?' will nearly always get results.

That being said I occasionally buy designer handbags and I've never been brace enough to haggle in those very posh shops. Maybe I'm a mug too.

We did our kitchen last year. We had quotes from howdens, magnet and wren with our own fitter.

Our kitchen is an odd shape/layout and I couldnt get on with DIY kitchens at all, despite several recommendations. For example, we needed a couple of cupboards cutting down height/width wise to accommodate pipes and the hallway stairs that couldn't be moved, and we have to move the gas hob and built in oven from their original positions.

I quite happily played all 3 suppliers off against each other, to the point I was sending each others quotes to the others to ensure we were getting like for like.

Howdens came in a little cheaper, but were missing a couple of items off and downgraded some appliances.

We ended up going with magnet who gave the original quote and was the design we preferred. We got the appliances on a special offer (allegedly) and ended up with about £3,000 off of their original quote, and we were happy with the price we ended up at and the products we had.

Hi @DeltaAlphaDelta79 would you mind sharing a little bit about where you started price wise, and where you ended up? Just in terms of average discount to expect. But also what you ended up paying. Obviously if you don’t mind! Even a ballpark figure!

@TheBeaTgoeson1 will pm if ok

DIY Kitchens will provide units that are assembled but not fully fixed together so the fitter can cut them to size - we had two like that for our kitchen. It's very structured when it comes to ordering and the pricing is completely clear. I had them sense check my basket before I ordered and had asked the fitter to do the same too.

Not all kitchen suppliers and/or fitters will pass on their trade discount and they may well push you to the likes of Howdens or Magnet Trade where they get the biggest discount, not because it's best for you. Some will be completely upfront and share their undoctored invoices, some won't.

If you're happy with what you're getting and the design then it's very much down to personal choice. After getting our kitchen from DIY, two sets of friends also ordered from DIY because they were impressed by the quality and the price. If you find someone who fits Ultima Kitchens, they're the trade side of DIY so it's essentially the same product.

At the big kitchen places yes haggle. The first price will probably nearly knock you out. Certainly let them know your getting other quotes and is this their best price before you go looking elsewhere.

Others have already recommended DIY kitchens but there's also Kitchen Warehouse which is similar.

Once you have your expensive Wren / Magnet plan, take the plan to either of the above and see how much they would price it at.

You can then either take that quote back to Wren / Magnet etc and ask them to match (or try to), or get DIY / KW to do it.

4 or 5 years ago now but we used Wren. They had various special offers on at the time and we were made aware of all of them, but were told there was no room to haggle beyond taking advantage of these offers. The ‘design’/sales guy was very good. We wouldn’t use them again though because there were stock problems they didn’t tell us about and the delivery process was absolutely horrendous.

Always haggle on a substantial purchase. I haggled on a new sofa which was on sale. Was told there was no wiggle room on the actual price, but we negotiated free delivery and free collection/removal of our old one.

A few years ago I got a quote from Wren for £32k. After about 10 minutes of negotiation the price dropped to £22k. If a salesman can wipe £10k of the price in ten minutes, I wouldn't trust the company with a bargepole. We went to a joiner who had his own supplier he worked with.

Wren usually have some sort of sale of some styles or cheap white goods. I thought their prices were pretty good, we fitted ourselves and got worktops separately. And we didn't get a lot of the fiddly trim pieces partly because they added to the length of the units so the runs wouldn't have fit as we had measured them.

They did come out and measure but I had already measured and figured out what we wanted, but the guy did make some good suggestions. Check their final design and list of components, some very odd mistakes on ours (which they corrected) we didn't notice a couple of short wall cupboards that should have been tall ones but they replaced them and we got to keep the wrong ones, so we put them up as extras over the freezers in the utility room, quite handy.

You’re welcome. Also meant to say - if you do it the way I did, DO NOT tell the fitter your budget, or at least understate it. I had a budget of 12k in my mind, told the fitter 10k, which he said at the time was a ‘huge’ budget, but then funnily enough, in the final reckoning it did all come to 10k. So I was kicking myself for telling him 10k.

The same probably goes for all trades though - they have a knack for magically making the job ‘fit’ your entire budget, even when you know your budget is a healthy one to start with… That being said, the standard of his work was excellent and I couldn’t fault him on the quality of the job.

Thank you!! And thanks everyone ❤️

We haggled with Magnet, and also managed to get our flooring thrown in for free. Kitchen should have cost 27k paid around 22k. We also got a quote from Wren who weren't prepared to move on price once all the initial special offers had been applied, so their quote was around 24k.

We got an 80% manager’s discount from Magnet. We were happy with that

If Magnet had given us a genuine 80% manager's discount we'd have been lucky to get a few cupboard doors given the experience I posted upthread.

Diy kitchens was a lot cheaper and better quality than wren.

I guess it depends on the manager & whether they are meeting their sales targets etc. The items we wanted were in the ‘sale’ and we negotiated an extra discount off these already discounted prices (we used a comparable quote from DIY to argue our case). It came to slightly more than DIY but it was nice to have someone to come & measure up etc. We didn’t buy any appliances, taps, door handles or worktops from them as their prices couldn’t compete, plus we used our own fitter. I’m not recommending Magnet btw, I’m just saying what we did ourselves. That being said I’m v happy with the finished product & because it cost over £10,000 we also got 3 years interest free credit which really helped our budget.