Pedler: Adventures in Retail Parts: Anxiety, Rain, and the Death of Counter Culture

I recently had a harrowing experience. I bought wiper blades from a large aftermarket auto parts retail store, and then had to return them to buy different ones. That's it. That was the harrowing experience. I didn't get in a car accident on the way home. I wasn't robbed at gunpoint. No one yelled at me. And to my great credit, I didn't yell at anyone.

Despite my love for the automotive aftermarket, I do not enjoy anything about the process of going into a brick-and-mortar parts store as a customer. I was an automotive counterperson and then a district manager for over 10 years in the 1980s and '90s. Being a counterperson is a uniquely difficult and stressful job. You must know as much as a mechanic without actually being a mechanic. Every problem is urgent. Every customer is having a terrible day, and you are the target of their ire. Meals are eaten standing up between helping customers. The phone rings constantly. There is never enough help on a parts counter. The things you sell often don't stay sold. Invariably (and sneakily), battery acid will ruin every article of clothing you wear to work. Because of these things, customers don't always get the friendly, professional, frictionless purchasing experience they deserve.

I know all of this from experience and am sympathetic to the challenges that counterpeople face. Still, I have a tortured relationship with auto parts stores, and I steel myself for the act of walking into one. First, it's the smell — grease, brake dust, and plastic. It's not a bad smell, necessarily, but it's distinct. Then it's the ringing phone. Then it's the line of people waiting at the counter (they are patient on the outside). Then it's the realization that the poor cashier seems to be the only person working there. She's been on her feet and probably hasn't had so much as a bathroom break for four hours. This is why I become anxious every time I walk into an auto parts store. Parts stores are a great equalizer. No one there cares about my decades-long quest for "right part, right time, right place." No one cares that you're a master repair technician turned CEO of a major aftermarket parts manufacturer. All our experience in this world counts for nothing. We are powerless there.

Knowing this, I showed up prepared to buy those wiper blades. I knew what sizes I needed, the style I wanted, and the type of wiper arms on my vehicles. I did not need help with this purchasing process, and indeed, I did not get any. I walked in, spent a few minutes examining my options, and decided how much I wanted to spend. Then I made my selections and went to the front of the store to pay. There was a line, but there was also a self-checkout kiosk. I paid $100 at the kiosk for four store-brand wiper blades and left. I spoke to no one, and no one spoke to me. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

When I installed the new wiper blades, they didn't fit the arms as snugly as I would have liked. They didn't clear the windshield well, and every storm threatened to yeet the wiper blades into the sky like cows in a tornado. After the second white-knuckle drive in the rain, I knew I needed to return them. Despite having kept my receipt, I was denied a refund. (I resisted the urge to yell "DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I AM?")

Would you believe that we are only at the midpoint of this story? We are, because I had no wiper blades and a storm was coming.

Not keen to repeat that experience, I made the decision to purchase new wiper blades from an automotive e-commerce site, and the blades would be my tried-and-proven favorite brand, to which I am now fiercely loyal. I went to one website and typed the brand into the search. The search results yielded pages of options. Unfortunately, neither the thumbnail images nor the primary product descriptions showed the size. I was forced to click on every thumbnail to see a longer description that contained the size. Another site had a vehicle lookup that yielded accurate results, but the descriptions were inconsistent. I started looking at other brands and found similar issues. The primary descriptions contained irrelevant, too much, or too little information. There were multiples of the exact same images. The choices for some of the primary images were not photos but text. Installation instructions were mostly absent. The quality gap between sites and brands is wider than the bucket in which I keep my regretful purchasing decisions. I was both disappointed and unsurprised.

Here is where the problem lies: the people who decide how much money should be spent improving content and catalog data think people still sell parts. There are incredibly knowledgeable and talented counterpeople out there. But if they haven't already been promoted to positions away from the counter, they're about to be. So if people don't sell parts anymore, what does?

I heard the following bit of (paraphrased) wisdom years ago at a conference: the product isn't your part, the product is the data about your part. Your finest selling tool is your catalog and content team. They are the ones writing the story of every part sold, and electronic catalogs and AI assistants are telling that story. If your content team is Shakespeare, your part is "Macbeth," and ecats and AI assistants are Laurence Olivier. If you don't have resources pointed at catalogs and content, you end up with "Battlefield Earth."

All told, I purchased eight wiper blades without speaking to another human, and the experience was … not ideal. But I know this industry, and I am full of optimism. Somewhere out there, a brilliant catalog manager is crafting perfect descriptions or fixing an interchange, and a skilled developer is making a smarter user experience. We may not sell parts the way we used to, but there are at least as many people who care deeply about getting it right. The aftermarket is crowded with people who figure things out. If anyone can turn "Battlefield Earth" into "Macbeth," it's us.