craftgrrl | Has anyone else had issues with their silver parts, recently?

Have any other jewelers in this community noticed a quality difference in the silver products they have bought, recently? Ever since the last few price hikes in the metal market, I've found that supplier after supplier lets me down, selling me sterling silver wire or fittings that claim to be what they were before, but are of inferior quality, especially in the sense of strength/durability/brittleness. I am finding it hard to question, any more, that the actual manufacturors of the silver goods are compensating for the value increases not only by raising prices, but by producing goods of a lower standard. I am wasting time and money, compensating for crap quality sterling parts breaking far too easily, in the most recent work I've done for customers and myself. (Thankfully, it's only been an issue in the past few months.) That is obviously good neither for me nor my customers, yet I'm likewise reluctant to simply stop crafting things within the medium.

To top it all off, after making hundreds of individual componants from PMC3-fine silver, I have suddenly run into a packet that wasn't what all the others had been. According to the manufacturor's chart (and there is only one manufacturor of that particular product), it is supposed to have a shrinkage rate of 10-15%. In pieces the size of the pieces I made from this rogue packet, the resulting size difference between pre- and post-firing pieces has never been noticable. This time, however, there was a shrinkage rate of 16-25%. -- which led to a rather noticible difference, with the pieces ending up a good 1/4" smaller than they were ordered to be. Most of my commissions involve at least some work with PMC, and I feel punched in the gut by the notion that it, too, is suddenly unreliable and unpredictable.

So, am I alone with this/these problems? Ideas? I'm going to be writing to the distributor of the PMC products, that I use, as well as the manufacturing company, if I can manage it -- I doubt it'll get me anywhere, but it can't hurt. At least there are still plenty of sources for sterling wire and parts, to test.