the.com/wholesaler
Sells you a mountain of socks so you can sell one pair at a time.
means A business that buys goods in bulk from manufacturers and resells them in large quantities to retailers, not directly to the end customer.
from From 'whole' plus 'sale' — the 'whole' here meaning entire or complete, as in dealing with the full lot rather than a piece of it. The word emerged in English as trade language needed a term for selling 'by the whole' (in bulk) as opposed to 'by retail' (a word from Old French 'retaillier,' to cut up again) — retail literally means cutting the big thing into small pieces to sell, so wholesale is quite literally its uncut opposite.
- margin trick
- profits from volume, not markup per item
- middleman role
- buys from makers, skips retail rent entirely
- risk bearer
- stockpiles inventory so retailers do not have to