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Howard Speaks: The Great Dental Supply Shake-Up by Dr. Howard Farran, DDS, MBA

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Categories: Practice Management, HR and Accounting;
Howard Speaks: The Great Dental Supply Shake-Up

Why loyalty is suddenly expensive

by Dr. Howard Farran, founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Dentaltown magazine
Each Howard Speaks article is written by Dr. Howard Farran with the assistance of AI. Every piece is developed, reviewed, and refined under Dr. Farran’s direction to ensure it reflects his authentic voice, insights, and experience.
Dentistry runs on a supply chain built for a world that no longer exists. Long before price transparency, e-commerce, and real-time comparison shopping, the dominant dental distributors earned loyalty by being everything at once. They delivered daily, handled returns, financed big equipment, trained teams, supported software, and sent a human rep to stand between the dentist and the chaos. In that environment, loyalty made sense. Convenience was scarce. Information was scarce. Risk reduction had real value.

That world quietly ended.

Today, convenience is everywhere. Price discovery is instant. Dentists can see the spread. Once that happens, loyalty does not disappear; it simply becomes expensive.

For decades, the distributor loyalty model worked the same way. Concentrate your share of wallet and you earn points, tiers, rebates, free-shipping thresholds, service perks, and use-it-or-lose-it dollars. Spend more, and you get rewarded. Spend less, and you fall behind. The higher the tier, the better the earning rate. As the quarter closes, the pressure builds to push orders through so status isn’t wasted.

That architecture is not evil. It is simply not free.

Rewards are funded somewhere. In distribution, that usually means margin, manufacturer incentives, and behavioral lock-in. The hidden cost is optionality. Once a practice is chasing a tier, a rebate, or expiring program dollars, it stops shopping the market on every item. The office is no longer buying gloves. It is buying progress toward a reward threshold. At that point, every order raises an uncomfortable question: Am I buying what is best for my practice, or what protects my tier?

This tension has always existed. What changed is that dentists can no longer avoid seeing it.

Over the last several years, procurement across health care has been moving steadily toward digital-first purchasing. Dentistry is no exception. Online platforms, marketplaces, and automated ordering tools make it faster to compare prices, easier to reorder, and far less dependent on a rep relationship. This shift did not begin yesterday. It accelerated when practices were forced online during the pandemic and never fully reversed. What is different now is the financial pressure.

Overhead is up. Everything from supplies and labor to labs, equipment, and rent costs more. Reimbursement did not magically keep pace. When margins tighten, dentists interrogate every line item. Vendor relationships that were never questioned suddenly get audited. That does not mean dentists changed. Markets did.

As a result, smaller and digital-first suppliers have gained traction by challenging three elements that the traditional distribution model has historically monetized: emotional loyalty, layered intermediaries, and opaque margins.

Emotional loyalty is the familiar story. My rep takes care of me. My rep knows my practice. My rep will fix it if something goes wrong. That relationship still has value—especially for complex equipment, service, and integration-heavy purchases. But it is far less compelling when applied to commodity items that ship in a box and sit in a drawer.

Layered intermediaries are harder to see but easier to feel. Field sales teams, branch infrastructure, legacy ordering systems, bundled services, and administrative overhead all cost money. Not every practice values those layers equally. A digital-first supplier with lean operations may be able to offer more competitive pricing by operating with less structural overhead.

Opaque margins may be the biggest fracture point. Two dentists can pay two very different prices for the same item based on agreements, tiers, negotiated deals, and timing. That lack of consistency was tolerable when comparison was difficult, but far harder to justify when price transparency is a click away.

Are large suppliers always more expensive and smaller suppliers always cheaper? No. Reality is messier. Large distributors can be highly competitive on strategically priced items or on items with strong manufacturer programs. When rebates, shipping, returns, financing, and uptime support are factored in, the math can flip. The honest answer is that some smaller suppliers can reduce costs on day-to-day consumables for certain practices, particularly when consistent SKU-by-SKU comparison is possible. The savings are uneven. They depend on what you buy, how standardized your ordering is, and how much you value full service.

This is why the conversation has shifted from loyalty to value. Loyalty now has to earn its keep.

One notable development in this space is the emergence of platforms that combine price transparency with elements of process outsourcing. Rather than asking dentists to shop harder or manage more vendors, these platforms focus on simplifying procurement and reducing administrative friction. They speak directly to the pain points practices complain about in break rooms and online forums: inventory headaches, shrink, last-minute emergencies, endless price shopping, flash sales, and administrative tasks that no one went to dental school to manage. When overhead rises, time suddenly has a dollar value.

Operators in this space did not invent dentist price sensitivity. They recognized that modern technology makes certain traditional distribution layers optional for a large portion of routine purchasing. When price transparency and automation are combined, the emotional loyalty premium becomes visible. Dentists are not betraying relationships. They are responding rationally to pressure.

The broader industry signals reinforce this shift. Large distributors themselves are under pressure to evolve. Private equity activity has increased. Boards face greater scrutiny. Companies are being taken private to restructure, invest, and rethink strategy outside the quarterly earnings spotlight. None of that happens in an industry that is perfectly comfortable with the status quo.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to declare the death of the large distributor. They still play an essential role—equipment, service, financing, training, software integration, and regulatory complexity all matter. When something breaks, and production is on the line, reliability outweighs saving a few percentage points on gloves. The future is not winner-take-all. It is hybrid.

Smart practices are unbundling their loyalty. Commodity supplies get shopped or automated. Complex purchases stay relationship-driven. Reporting tools are used not just to track rebates, but to understand true spend patterns. Dentists are learning to separate convenience from complacency.

There is also a patient-care angle hiding in all of this. Rising overhead eventually shows up in fees. Patients feel it. Practices that manage supply costs intelligently buy themselves breathing room. That room can be used to avoid fee increases, invest in better materials, or improve the patient experience.

The humor is that dentistry spent decades pretending supply ordering was a solved problem. It was background noise. Then costs spiked, margins tightened, and suddenly everyone became an amateur supply-chain analyst. The reality is that dentists are doing what they have always done: adapting, optimizing, and seeking leverage wherever they can find it.

The great dental supply shake-up is not about dentists becoming cheap. It is about dentists becoming informed. Loyalty did not disappear. It just stopped being blind.

How are you rethinking loyalty in your own supply ordering, and where do you draw the line between price savings and the value of service and relationships? 

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