Shut Up and Take My Money!

Was Satch the guy who wrote about seeing a 1st Gen Rabbit with the license plate "Brer"?

TheRX7Project said:

Two shops come to mind in the Milwaukee area- Borchardts Speed Automotive for the drag and circle track guys, and Pegasus Auto Racing Supplies for the road course guys.

+1 for Pegasus. Candy store In my backyard.

re old school guitar shops, check out Wades and Cream City Music.

Thanks for the write David. Really enjoyed this piece and mainly because I had this frustration today too. 

Working on a project for a friend today installing a radio into his Lexus....a day after doing a 10 hour chump race too. He ordered everything he thought he needed minus the antenna adapter. Best buy, autozone, O'Reilly, NAPA, Wal-Mart, Discount Auto, and even a audio shop in town didn't have this simple piece that fits both Lexus, Toyotas, and Subarus. Yea Amazon has it for $9.99 and it could get here in two days but it's frustrating when youre trying to finish a project and do it right and the thing that really got me is that the audio shop didn't even have it. I was met with the response "Dude we order by request, no sense in having the overhead of that inventory."  Try finding locally stocked performance parts for your 1994 honda accord lol. 

I hate not being able to go somewhere and look at it, take measurements, feel it, inspect it, test it, take it home that day. 

DirtyBird222 said:the thing that really got me is that the audio shop didn't even have it. I was met with the response "Dude we order by request, no sense in having the overhead of that inventory." 

Heck, at the small bike shop where I worked in the mid 90s, we understood that if you wanna retail, you gotta stock.  If someone is willing to wait a week to get a part, they can wait a week and get it from Supergo for a lot less money.  They walked into your building because they want something NOW.

I live near one of the great guitar shops anywhere - Elderly Instruments.  I love going on there and spending time with basses I cant have (yet).  Great people, great advice, superb service, and if they don’t have it, you probably don’t need it.

 when I would go into those places, 99% of the time I knew more about the part I needed, the location it was in, and how long it would take to get. The douche behind the counter usually had no idea

As an automotive teacher and a technician I constantly run into people who will take something i say with more than a grain of salt because a counterperson at a parts store said something different. It's difficult to explain kindly, but it basically comes down to "if they knew how to do what I do, they'd be doing it, because it's a lot more money". The sad truth is that parts stores don't pay people enough to be experts or anywhere near it. If you somehow become an expert while working counter sales at a parts store, there's a good chance you can use those skills to jump ship for twice the money, or maybe 3x if you become a very good technician.   

 I've decided to be very forgiving of automotive counter people who don't know much about what they sell. I know what i expect to be paid for my knowledge level and I can't ask them to even come close for what they make. Now, i DO expect them to know how to SELL me what i want. I value their expertise of how to navigate their computer system, how to find things on their actual shelves, and how to be pleasant and efficient. If their career ambitions lie elsewhere besides 'mastering the retail world' then i fully respect and encourage their desire to get the hell out of retail. Most of them will, and some "douche" who doesn't know anything yet will step onto that stepping stone in their place. 

That's all referring to automotive, but i think it applies pretty broadly. It's rare that companies  value knowledge enough to actually pay for it. And if they're not getting paid for it, i'm not going to come in there and bitch about what the counterpeople don't know. As soon as they DO know, they should go sell their expertise to someone willing to pay for it, and i'll be happy for them!

This is pretty much in the vein of the original article. If you ever DO find places that value expertise enough to pay their own employees for it, that might be a good opportunity for you to vote with your dollars. 

Sanchinguy said:

I live near one of the great guitar shops anywhere - Elderly Instruments.  I love going on there and spending time with basses I cant have (yet).  Great people, great advice, superb service, and if they don’t have it, you probably don’t need it.

I know what you mean. When I lived in Lansing I was in there on a regular basis. It is one of the places I always visit when I am back in town.

TheRX7Project said:

Two shops come to mind in the Milwaukee area- Borchardts Speed Automotive for the drag and circle track guys, and Pegasus Auto Racing Supplies for the road course guys.

I was living west of Chicago and needed a helmet.  I knew I was going to be up in Milwaukee in a couple weeks so I waited so I could visit Pegasus.  I wanted to be able to try it on and get the right fit.  Some helmets just don't fit me very well.  After I tried it on the guy there said that I could have them set it aside with my name on it and then I could call in to buy and skip sales tax but would have to pay shipping.  I ended up taking it with me and paid the WI tax.

>Scott

I enjoy checking out parts in person too, but like this article states, speed shops with inventory just don't exist anymore. All the speed shops around me don't even want to talk to you unless you are handing them a $10k check for an off the shelf solution to make big dyno numbers. Everyone I talk to asks what I'm making at the wheels since my engine swap and are disappointed that it is stock engine (except for a few weak link upgrades) for reliable road coarse and daily driving. And all the off road shops only stock wheels and winches, but can only tell you the specs on the box or what "looks" better.

In opposition to a fair number of comments on here:

The current paradigm is far superior than the old one.  I think there's a lot of selective memories here of that time the counter guy knew exactly how to help you and had the part on the shelf.  You're forgetting the much, MUCH vaster number of times the guy had no idea what you were talking about and then you had to trial and error through a bunch of parts the guy had to order to get it right.

The collective internet knowledge is MUCH broader and MUCH deeper.  I will grant however that there is a certain skill to filtering the good information from the bad information on the internet.  And probably not everyone has that skill.

You can still talk to that guy if you really want, because he's here on the internet, too.  And you're much likelier to get the part you need because now you have access to everyone's inventory instead of just the memory of that one guy you're talking to.

I agree that handling the parts is fun, but that's a small price to pay for getting what we have today.  Handling the parts didn't really have any sort of real impact on the final results of your project anyways.

I did enjoy the article. :)

"Collective internet knowledge" is also the result of echo chambers, so there can be some really bad info out there that just gets repeated. That's been the case with any community, really. That counter guy at the local speed shop with the rose-tinted windows had the same problem.

But the ability to connect with an expert from anywhere in the world is overlooked. Once there was a small Miata performance shop based in West Orange, NJ. The guy who ran it knew the cars really well. But if you weren't in West Orange, you had to find out about the guy and make a long distance phone call. It was the ability of people to find that guy online and get solid technical information from him that really helped the wider community. As a bonus, it also helped sales of the shop's parts and thanks to those higher sales, the inventory improved so it was more likely you could get your parts from that guy. I'm pretty sure you all know where this is going. You can no longer walk into that small shop in West Orange, but you can still get those parts and get tech support from a team of experts that have an average of nearly 10 years of service at the company and who very likely developed the parts - from anywhere in the world. Small price to pay for not being able to hold a random thing in your hand.

For those who think this is a new thing - that small shop went online/mail-order only 24 years ago and was strongly involved in the internet community at the time.

captdownshift said:

I blame it on guys who work in speedshops but only utilize them to fill 2 big bottles of nitrous and opt to overnight everything else from Japan.

And Motovicity.

And now it appears this thread has managed to outlive Motivicity.

In reply to MadScientistMatt :

Crazy times. I still do miss looking at stuff before ordering it. 

The internet (and a bazillion different car platforms becoming popular since the '90s) led to an optimization culture that made parts that were "good enough" obsolete in favor of the "perfect" part for a certain situation. It would be tough for B&Ms to keep the "perfect" parts in stock unless they were highly specialized or huge like Summit and Jeg's. Like in 3rd-4th Gen F-Body land how if you were putting Edelbrock parts on in the '90s people were like, "cool" but now there's been 4 newer generations of suppliers to go through and Edelbrock has little street cred except for a few parts. And in the old days if you wanted to run something "strange" vehicle-wise you were kinda screwed.

Here in Ohio we have Jeg's and Summit B&Ms so it's the best of both worlds!

In reply to GCrites80s :

I kepty getting hung up on B&M, you know the transmission/shifter people... who were part of the Mr. Gasket company, based here in Cleveland.

Oh right. Well I guess B&M and Hurst merged and are now a part of Holley.

They are still around in my area, though I feel the Honda and Japanese car focused ones seem to cater more to the lower end of the market so you see a lot of the replica parts and wheels at most of the shops. It makes sense since that is what probably sells.

But some do stock some good maintenance related parts at a reasonable cost if you need something in a pinch like Widebands, Cometic and Vibrant parts. 

I still fondly remember my local speed shop, Oval Speed Unlimited. Dennis Freese helped (and continues to help) so many racers in the oval-track scene near him on Long Island. 

If I'm looking for parts for the mustang, It's great having speedway motors just an hour up the road. They get my business for anything not Fox Body specific. It's great on how much they have grown over the years. Been going there for a long time. The only bad thing is it usually ends up being a day trip as I'll end up in the Museum looking at stuff and listening to the stories of the cars for hours. 

I do miss all of the mustang tuners that lived in Omaha. I learned more from Kenny Brown on mustangs than any other person alive. Probably good he isn't within 2 miles of the house any more, I'd probably be broke. 

Cant' believe I missed this thread the first time around.

We still have a speed shop; while they mostly cater to drag racers they have general equipment. 

I try to shop local whenever possible.

In my opinion, here's what happened in one sentence:

"We don't have it but we can order it"

Every time I try to support local I get that. Then I order it online myself, for less money and to my doorstep. It sucks but What's in it for the consumer? I hate to see places go out of business but the consumer can't just pay more and wait longer for your services if you're just selling parts.

Before Summit had a location in Atlanta there was Barnett performance and even though they were an old school hot rod shop, they had my ARP head studs and Cometic head gasket for my Galant VR4 in stock. Hell yeah I'll pay a little extra for that convenience. If I have to wait though, I'll do it all myself.

That's how you nuke the internet: with stuff. An unbelievable amount of stuff. Back before the internet all you could do was mail order or order something from a store and then go back and get it when it came in if not in stock. Nowadays to most people going in, ordering it, then coming back in a week is unacceptable unless they were going to be back in a week anyway or something. I was surprised though, that when I worked at Hobbytown (~2009) how many people didn't mind still at that time. In fact, up until I closed all of my used video game stores in the past couple years people were still asking for that. Unfortunately we didn't have a way of ordering individual used games at a decent margin.

It's one thing when you go to your FLAPS down the street and you order something at 10AM and it's there at 3PM while you clean parts and eat lunch in between but another having to go across town a week apart.

Anyway, unfortunately the "nuke the internet with stuff" option is very, very expensive for the business. You have to buy and buy and buy, sell a little, then buy buy buy 2-3 dollars worth for each dollar you take in for a long time.

What's nice about having Jeg's in town is that if I screw up and order a wrong part I can take it to the b&m (lowercase as not to confuse) location for the return then they send the right one to my house right at the counter. If there is a cost difference that's handled right there too.

I frequent a small tool / hardware shop and rarely spend more than a few bucks on nuts and bolts but they always have it!  And really miss my local electronics shop for the odd ball bit of switch/connector etc.  Especially miss the expertise because I'm typically on a wild goose chase and having someone there to point me in the right direction is more than lacking online...

Back in the 70s in Los Angeles we had:

Vilem Hann for street driven import cars,

West L A Racing Equipment for domestics. Bob Fox was the owner and had done drags in a 409 Impala. I was plannig on a 409 swap and he helped a lot.

Then came a chain called Super Shops.

Me in the West L A Racing Equipment tee

In reply to L5wolvesf :

I knew we had talked a couple of times at LVR SCCA race................the picture confirms it.

I think you may have known Gordon Laduke?