I’m about to let you in on a little known fact about home improvement by peeling back a little of the veneer of ignorance that shrouds the majority of Do It Yourself projects. If you find what I’m about to tell you to be too great a challenge to your current belief system, I’m sorry, but it is better that you hear it from me than from some strange contractor out in the street.
There is no such animal as a standard or universal replacement part.
No matter what you have been lead to believe, no matter what you may read on the package, nothing fits in every situation, every time. Now I realize that I may just have put both your belief system and my own personal safety in jeopardy, but it’s a risk I feel I have to take.
I can no longer stand idly by while millions of self-described handy men and women march through home improvement warehouses, small hardware stores and huge lumber yards basing their misplaced sense of self confidence on the fact that since the packaging, the website or the guy in the vest told you that all you need is a “standard” replacement part: then they should have no problem making the repairs themselves.
I’m sure that right now, goons hired by the companies that make trillions of dollars selling “universal” replacement this or that’s are conspiring to make sure I accidentally fall over a cliff or meet an untimely death due to a short circuited pallet jack in the store, but the truth must come out.
Nothing in home improvement is ever universal or standard. Granted, there are parts that will work most of the time, or usually, or even in 80% of cases, but nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing will work all of the time. If truth were a part of advertising, then all of the packaging that uses the terms “standard” or “universal” would substitute truthful terms like “probably” or “usually”, but words like that don’t sell.
This concept of “Standard” is so ingrained in the imagination of so many of my customers that I can’t convince them otherwise. I had one gentleman come into the store with what appeared to be his wife and his mother. It was a Sunday and I assumed that the family was just making their way home from church. The wife asked me if we had replacement toilet tanks. This is a common allusion. Even though every single toilet tank you have ever seen standing proudly above it’s bowl looks exactly like every other tank, there are subtle difference in the ways they are manufactured that assures that only specific tanks will work on specific bowls. It makes no sense unless you are in the business of selling toilets.
If a toilet didn’t break, then no one would ever buy another one. So the manufactures assure themselves a regular, tidy profit by making each tank and bowl distinct enough to require that you buy the complete package if you break any of the parts.
This line of thinking is not unique to toilet manufactures, but is a key component of product development in the entire home building industry. Nothing can ever be easily fixed. Universal replacement parts are the holy grail of the industry. Everybody is looking for them, but nobody can ever find them and somehow the legend of their existence will not die.
The perfect design, from a manufacturer’s point of view, will insure that the cost of manufacturer specific replacement parts exactly equals 300% of the cost of simply replacing the whole thing. By making their products minutely unique, they protect themselves from having future business siphoned away by those goon hiring unscrupulous vendors who peddle untruthfully marked “Universal” replacement parts.
But back to the gentlemen with his wife and mother. I explained, as clearly and as simply as I could, that there was no such thing as a universal replacement tank. I offered to order the exact tank they needed as a replacement part if they could give me some information on the model of toilet they had. The gentleman then told me, in an exasperated tone, that all he needed was a “standard” toilet tank. “Ahh…” I thought, “If only that were somehow possible”
I again re-iterated the fact that there are no “standard” tanks and that I doubted very much that anything I sold would work on his toilet which he informed me was; “only about 6 years old”. Six years might as well be a lifetime given the rapidity with which manufacturers abandoned design, and I knew he was in for a frustrating Sunday afternoon.
When the truth of my revelation failed to mesh with his delusion, he turned in a huff and told his wife and mother that; ”He doesn’t know what the f*** he’s talking about!” I ignored his profanity, relishing the situation that I knew would arise in the next two hours.
Like clockwork, the profane gentleman wandered back into my department before the end of my shift asking me to help him find a replacement toilet. I immediately sold him the most overpriced, worst performing toilet that we had in the store. He never acknowledged that I did know what the f*** I was talking about, but that’s ok. At retail, we’ll take your money over an apology any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
No comments:
Post a Comment