I was in the shop office painting, which is not something procurement managers usually admit to.
The paint roller cost $6.47. I still have that line item in our purchasing tracker, right above the $418.50 we paid for the new drill press. I am the kind of person who tracks these things. I also know, because the same tracker tells me, that a First-Class Mail letter costs $0.73 as of January 2025 (usps.com/stamps), and that USPS adjusts its rates every January and July. That's the level of nerd you're dealing with.
The phone rang while I was trying to make room on the bench for that drill press. I almost didn't answer, because my hand was covered in primer.
It was a Hitachi excavator dealer from Kelowna, returning my call from the Friday before. I'd almost forgotten I'd left a message, because by that point I'd left a lot of messages for people who never called back. To understand why that call mattered, you need to know how the two weeks before it went.
Some background on me: I'm the procurement manager at a civil construction company just outside Kamloops, BC. In January 2018, we were 12 employees. Today we're around 85. I've managed our equipment budget — roughly $2.4 million a year — since 2017, negotiated with 40-plus vendors, and documented every order in a cost tracking system I built after a vendor hit us with a restocking fee that ate half the margin on a small job. I don't like being surprised by costs.
We'd just won a municipal sub-contract in the BC Interior that needed a 13-ton-class excavator. For two weeks I'd been searching variations of "hitachi excavators for sale in bc," "hitachi dealer bc," "what's a fair price for a ZX130" — the whole desperate routine.
The dealership that couldn't see us
The first dealer I called was a big multi-brand outfit in the Lower Mainland. I told the sales coordinator we were a 12-person operation, ready to buy one machine and maybe a second within a couple of years. She asked how many machines we were running. I said one. She said the excavator sales rep would "circle back." Nobody circled. I called again — same promise, same silence.
Honestly, I'm not sure why. My best guess is that a one-machine buyer doesn't fit the productivity targets of a sales team built to move fleets. That is a reasonable way to run a business, I suppose. But it cost them a customer who now spends seven figures a year on equipment. I've never sent the "thanks for not calling back" email, but I think about it.
A different manufacturer's dealer — a strong brand, so I'll leave the name out of it — did take the meeting. Their quote for a comparable machine came in $22,400 under the Hitachi number. For a company our size, that was real money. Two of our supervisors thought we should take it on the spot. I asked for a week.
Then I finally got through to the Hitachi dealer in Kelowna. I gave them my small-contractor preamble — "we're small, one excavator, maybe two in a couple of years" — and the sales manager said:
"One machine or ten. If it's a fit, it's a fit. Let's find out if it fits."
That sentence was the reason the spreadsheet existed at all.
The spreadsheet that killed the easy choice
People assume the lowest quote means the vendor is more efficient. What they don't see is which costs are being hidden or deferred. Most buyers focus on the machine spec sheet and completely miss the parts counter — but the machine is only the start of the cost.
So I put together a total cost of ownership (TCO) sheet with the things a brochure won't tell you:
- Purchase price, delivered to our yard outside Kamloops
- Distance to the nearest dealer, and how quickly they actually respond
- Parts availability — do they stock common wear parts, or order everything from a warehouse in another province?
- Warranty terms, including who pays for the service truck when something breaks
- Projected resale value after five years and roughly 6,000 hours
- Consumables: filters, hydraulic oil, wear parts — the small stuff that always adds up
- Operator comfort, because good operators are expensive to replace and a cramped cab costs more in turnover than it saves in sticker price
I built the sheet over a weekend. The $22,400 gap shrank to about $9,000 once I ran the numbers on resale and parts. Then it shrank again when I called the other brand's regional support line to ask about parts availability. The person on the phone told me to "open a ticket online." A ticket. For an excavator that was supposed to be working in our yard within the month.
That didn't feel like a partnership. It felt like a toll booth.
The Hitachi dealer, by contrast, said:
"Tell me the part, and if it's not on the shelf, it's here in two days."
I didn't fully believe that until I drove to Kelowna and stood at their parts counter myself.
The parts counter test
You can judge a dealership better at the parts counter than in the showroom. The parts manager at the Kelowna dealership opened the bins for the ZX130 — filters, belts, sensors, hoses — and then showed me a paper binder with the previous twelve months of parts orders. It was the most convincing sales material I saw during the entire buying process. Per FTC advertising guidelines (ftc.gov), claims need to be truthful and substantiated with evidence, but a dealer who opens a binder and shows you actual part movements is doing the substantiating for you.
Then I noticed the saw in their fab shop. A Hitachi C12RSH2 — the 12-inch sliding compound miter saw. We had the same one back at our shop, and I'd spent a frustrating afternoon the week before searching "hitachi c12rsh2 parts" for carbon brushes and an arbor nut. I told the parts manager the story, and he pulled a small plastic bag out of a drawer. The shop kept spares for its own saw.
"That's the brush set," he said. "And if you need the arbor nut, it's the same part as the C12RSH." He wrote the part number on a sticky note and handed it to me. No upsell. No eye-roll. No "that saw is discontinued, let me show you the new one." The parts came to about $18 and were at our shop two days later.
An $18 parts order isn't a big deal. But it told me exactly how this dealership would treat me when a $30,000 hydraulic pump needed to ship overnight. That was the test.
They delivered the excavator in March 2018, and they brought a rental skid steer with them so we wouldn't lose a week of the schedule during handover. I didn't ask for that. Nobody else offered anything close to it.
Six years, five machines, one very boring spreadsheet
We bought our second Hitachi excavator in 2019, a third in 2021, and a Hitachi wheel loader somewhere in between. Last summer I wrote the purchase order for a fourth machine — a ZX210 for a highway job, delivered in November. Not because of brand loyalty. Because the dealer kept being good at the unglamorous things: answering the phone, stocking parts, showing up when a machine had a problem.
Did we save money? Yes and no. The TCO sheet was right about resale — the ZX130 sold within 3% of my five-year projection, which I'm not embarrassed to say made my month. But the spreadsheet missed things I couldn't put numbers on: a salesman who answers his own phone, a service manager who knows our operators by name. Those aren't line items, but they've saved us more than the spreadsheet ever did.
I don't have hard data on how we'd have fared with the other brand. Our comparisons are anecdotal, and I wish I'd tracked maintenance cost by machine from day one — I only got serious about that in 2021. What I can say is that over seven years and 40-plus vendor interactions, the cheapest quote we ever rejected was the one that taught me why cheap isn't a strategy.
What I'd tell someone searching Hitachi excavators for sale in BC right now
If you're a smaller contractor at the start of this, here's my unglamorous advice.
Shop the dealer harder than you shop the machine. You don't need to be smarter than a 5th grader to understand that iron breaks, and you won't be the one fixing it at 11 p.m. Ask to see the parts counter. Ask how many units they've sold in BC. Ask what the average wait time is on a starter motor. The dealers who answer directly are keepers. The ones who show you the showroom? Keep shopping.
Build a TCO sheet, even if it's ugly. Mine started as a yellow notepad and turned into the same spreadsheet I still maintain. Write down every assumption, because the act of writing catches your wishful thinking.
Verify every claim yourself. We looked at a used machine once advertised with "low hours, excellent condition." Per FTC business guidance (ftc.gov), ads should be truthful and claims substantiated — but your checkbook is doing the substantiating, not the FTC. We read the hour meter, checked the undercarriage, and walked away from what would have been a $40,000 mistake. Trust, but verify.
Never apologize for being small. When I started in this role, I thought a small order didn't deserve good service. That dealer in Kelowna corrected me. Today's small order is tomorrow's seven-figure account. If a business can't treat an $18 parts order with respect, it won't magically respect a $300,000 one. Respect doesn't scale with invoice size.
I still have the $6.47 paint roller in the tracker. And I still order parts from the same dealer for the same C12RSH2, which is still cutting frames in our shop. Take it from someone who painted his own office to save money: a dealer that treats you like you matter before you matter is worth more than any discount you have to chase.
