Hello GD. Hope all is well.
I hear you. They are trash. They have a full library of catalogs but if it is not in the computer it does not exist to most of the dumbos behind the counter.
Growing up in what used to be a small community outside El Paso before Auto Shack (previous name for AZ) came in you would go into the local parts store owned by the local neighbor. He had 2 other old gentlemen working there sometimes as soon as you walked in they already knew the part just by eyeballing it. Almost like they would challenge each other.
You would tell them what you needed either one of the three would answer it is
part # ***- yxz it is on row 4 shelf 5.
If it was a real odd ball thing they would go through all the freaking row of encyclopedia parts books to find it and if they did not have it they would cross reference it to other suppliers and find the exact match in a different brand.
Now it is mostly a bunch of lazy guys that don't want to look up or bother with nothing.
GOSH I miss those days!!
Have a very good weekend!
Dryriver1
My parents bought the independent auto parts store in 1978, that my Dad had worked in for 10 years. Mom and I were already spending time there since we'd go over there when she got off work. At that time, we were in central Houston, with lots of service station and garage customers. When the economic downturn hit in the Northeast and Midwest, the warehouses up there started looking for business in new markets. They'd come in and sell to our customers, cheaper than we could buy the parts. And many of these shops had fleet accounts because Houston was a boomtown then....
About those fleet accounts: Xerox had a large fleet of cars for their salesmen and techs to go around in. In 1978 they got Impalas. Summer of '78 was very hot and humid. Those cars had air conditioner problems from the factory, and I can tell you that we sold enough of those repair parts that we could almost pull them without looking in the catalogs. So they get rid of the Impalas that were half wore out anyway, and got LeMans sedans in '79. More AC problems, and these being midsize had smaller brakes than the Impalas. Got driven just as hard though....So they get rid of the Pontiacs. Get Ford Fairmonts, 200" straight six. Crap brakes, different size tires on each corner (this happened to several cars!)and AC that can't handle Gulf Coast summers. Our drivers ed car in high school was an identical car and it sucked big-time....
After they killed most of the Ford's, they got Dodge and Plymouth K cars.....
I don't think they had that big of a fleet too many years after that.
As this scenario was playing out, several of the garages and stations were getting shut down or forced to find new locations. Another example: a major Gulf station shop, that kept 6 or 7 mechanics busy, besides the gas station part of it, was told they had a week to vacate. The station was closed and demolished, to put an office tower up. While the highrise is being built, the recession in the North, comes south.
That office building had no tenants, other than a leasing office, for ten years.
We had catalogs in our store, three counters full of the racks. Some duplication, because you'd often have two countermen on the phone with different customers, looking up parts, taking orders and giving quotes. We had some walk-in trade too, and a third counterman to deal with that, and two delivery trucks running six days a week.
By 1983, Houston was slow enough and we'd lost enough shop customers, that we moved the store to the suburbs near where we lived. Mostly walk-in trade here, not too many shops and the ones there are, have stores they have deals with. We went on like that till the end of '87, intending to move to a different, cheaper shopping center.
During these years, the Indies like us gradually got run out of the market. In the span of a little more than a year,we had a Chief and an Auto Shack move in on two of the other three corners of the intersection our store was located near. There was already a Hi-Lo down the road a mile or so; this was before the local chain got bought out by O'Reilly's. The original Charlie's Hi-Lo was in Bellaire, and my dad used to go there a lot....
Computers were just beginning to come into play in the industry. Not too long before this, all invoices were handwritten, and the inventory controls were done by hand and notebook. It's still amazing to me, how the computer on the counter has mostly replaced the 40 foot rack of paper catalogs....and most of the younger parts people wouldn't know what to do with a catalog! My friend at my local O'Reilly's is third generation in the business so they do(even though they are 20 years younger than me!).
