Cash and carry vs delivered wholesale: the real cost of the van run
Buying & suppliers · 8 June 2026 · 6 min read
The Tuesday ritual
Every independent retailer knows the run: van loaded by 7am, round the cash and carry with a flatbed trolley, back to the shop by ten, then an hour of booking in. The prices beat the delivered wholesaler on most lines — that's the whole point. But "cheaper per case" and "cheaper for the business" are not the same sentence.
Cost the run honestly
A weekly cash and carry trip typically swallows three to four hours of owner time, plus fuel and the van. Price that time at what your hours are actually worth — even at a modest £15/hour, a three-hour round trip plus fuel is £50–60 per week, £2,600–3,000 a year. That's the membership fee nobody talks about.
Then add the quieter costs. The pallet of "deal" stock you didn't plan to buy. The substitutions you grab because your usual line was out. The fact that while you're pushing a trolley, you're not in the shop — and Tuesday morning's delivery gets booked in by whoever's free rather than checked properly.
Delivered wholesale charges its costs more visibly: higher case prices, delivery charges or minimum orders, and less flexibility on one-off bargains. But it gives you back the morning, and the invoice arrives as a file you can actually check against what landed.
The split that usually wins
Very few shops should be all-collected or all-delivered. The pattern that works for most:
- Delivered: the predictable core — the lines you reorder every single week in steady volumes. Predictability is exactly what delivered wholesale is good at, and what your time is too expensive to collect.
- Collected: chilled and short-dated lines you want to eyeball, genuine promotional parcels with sums you've actually done, and emergency top-ups
- Neither by default: the impulse pallet. If it wasn't on the list, it has to beat a written margin number to get in the van.
Make the decision with data, not nostalgia
The reason most shops over-collect is simple: without numbers, the visible saving (case price) beats the invisible costs (time, impulse buys, booking-in errors) every time. Flip that by writing three numbers down for a month: hours spent collecting, the value of unplanned purchases, and the lines that went out of stock because the run got skipped.
Stock software makes this almost free to answer. With live sales velocity per line you know your true weekly core — the candidate list for delivered — and with delivery booking-in by barcode you catch the shortages either supplier sends you. Several INV3NTORY stores discovered their "bargain" collected lines were dead stock with a £400 trolley bill attached. The van run survived; it just got shorter and smarter.
The goal isn't to kill the Tuesday ritual. It's to make sure every case in the van is there because the maths said so.