The Second Transition: From Analog to Digital 

Last month’s article covered the transition from independent parts stores to the rise of the big retailers, as well as my father’s transition from employee to owner-operator of his own small chain of stores. More big changes were on the horizon.  

Jim Pedler’s stores ran on inventory index cards for the first several years. Cards were a physical inventory system where every transaction had to be posted by hand at the end of each day. Each part number had a card with an inventory count on it, and the count was reduced by the quantity sold that day. It worked well enough when he had one store and could see everything happening in front of him. As soon as he had a second location to worry about, the cracks started showing. Cards weren't always getting updated. He couldn't see what his managers were discounting or why. "You're going to get your inventory stolen and maybe even cash," he told me, "unless you've got a better point-of-sale and inventory control system." So he bought a Triad system, costing $40,000 in 1980s dollars, for a multi-store point-of-sale setup that also handled accounting and, eventually, electronic parts cataloging. He initially declined to activate the EPC feature because it carried a monthly fee and he'd already spent a fortune on the hardware.

This next part delights my content-loving heart. When he finally switched on the EPC function, something clicked that he hadn't anticipated. Before computerized lookup, training a new counterperson took months. With an electronic catalog, he could train a person to work the counter in a few weeks. "It hit me like a freight train," he said, "how much quicker you could bring someone in off the street and turn them into a bona fide counter person." The large retailers agreed, as they also adopted this technology when it became available. 

Paul Arena, Global Product Line Manager, New Products at Gates is the son of an industry veteran who agrees on the immense value of content. “[My dad] has a really strong understanding of the aftermarket and how the business operates. He’s also been a big advocate for the importance of Catalog, often calling it “the best salesperson a company has,” which I think is a great perspective.” 

Learning the Hard Way 

I worked in my father’s stores and others in high school and college. Eventually I landed a job as a district commercial sales manager for Checker Auto Parts. It was a great job and I hated it so much that one Monday morning I started crying on the way to work. I knew I needed to make a change. A few months later I found a job in aftermarket parts catalog and data, which is my true love and where I've been since, much to my father’s delight. It turns out that he never wanted me to spend my life in an auto parts store, knowing how difficult that work is: "I was just tickled pink when you got into that area of the aftermarket that you got into."

Paul Arena, who entered the industry long after his own father was established in it, describes his experience of this inheritance. “We’ve taken different career paths, so I don’t often think of my career as mirroring his. But there have been moments where that connection has come into focus.” 

“Early on,” Paul continued, “I was usually the one being asked if I was related to him. Over time, as I’ve built my own relationships in the industry, that dynamic has shifted. A memorable moment was at Auto Care Connect 2025, when someone finally asked him if he was related to me. It felt like a real full-circle moment and something we both appreciated.” 

Darren Dellavechia, Catalog Manager for WHI Solutions, grew up in the industry and made this observation about becoming a version of his father, professionally speaking: “It felt like the invisible man walked through paint and suddenly I could see his footprints.  I hadn’t realized it until long after, but it wasn’t complicated. It was sort of surprising and came with a feeling of thanks and maybe some curiosity.” 

There was something else my dad gave me in those early years, too, that I've thought about a lot as my career has progressed. He was confident in my ability to do things I hadn't done yet and to rise to challenges before I'd had any evidence I could. Whether it was towing my broken-down first car (a 1978 Audi 5000) or captaining a river raft on the Colorado River, the routine was the same. I would look at him with apprehension and uncertainty. Even when I wasn't sure I could do something, he seemed so sure that I could. I would think “I trust this guy, so if he thinks I can do it, I guess I can." And I’d step into the unknown. Any competency and confidence I carry into a room of colleagues traces back to that. 

He also hired women to work in his stores, consistently, and by preference. He told me they were reliable, trustworthy, hard-working, and loyal - a great example for his two daughters. 

The Pillar and the Chain 

A specific memory surfaced when I interviewed my dad for this article. 

When he closed a store for the night, he would sometimes bring parts home. If someone called after hours - desperate, car broken down, a mechanic standing by who could fix it tonight if they could just get the part, my dad would have them come to the house. They'd ring the doorbell and whoever was home would hand over the part. They'd leave money, or he'd put it on their account. 

One of those after-hours customers turned out to be a woman named Melanie, who came to our door one evening to pick up a part for her car. Years later, I met Melanie through a mutual friend, and we became close. It wasn't until we'd known each other a while and she asked where I grew up that we realized that she'd once driven to our house to pick up an auto part from the parts store owner who lived there. I mean…small world doesn't begin to cover it. 

Independent jobber stores were integral parts of communities. "Years after I sold the stores," my dad said, "I'd be out mowing the lawn and somebody would walk by and say they’d been a customer." The customer who calls the retail chain store or orders from the ecommerce site doesn't know who owns it. The owner doesn't live in the neighborhood. Like many industries, we have sacrificed some of our community to commercialism. The consolidation he watched happen in real time, from a market where chains barely existed to one with few independent stores in the country, was a one-way door. 

"I was always kind of proud," he said, "that I could successfully run a very difficult business in a very difficult industry at the time." 

The Third Transition: The Rise of Dealer Parts

Near the end of our conversation, my father noted something that would have seemed almost laughable in his store days: OE dealership parts are now a serious competitive factor in the aftermarket. Back when he was running his stores, dealerships were barely on his radar as competition. They were very expensive, didn't deliver, and were generally difficult to do business with. "Virtually none," he said, when I asked how much pressure he felt from them. The aftermarket had the speed, the relationships, and the price advantage, and that was usually enough.

What's changed, he observed, is partly a quality story. As the aftermarket absorbed the painful fallout from cheaper, lower quality offshore parts, consumers and shops started paying more attention to fitment and reliability. OE brands filled that gap, commanding premium prices that would have seemed absurd in the era of $9.99 D52 brake pads. The dealerships, meanwhile, had a captive market in collision parts, but then figured out that there was money to be made in the service lane beyond collision and warranty work. It's a development my father watched from the outside as a jobber, a consumer, and a rep, and his verdict was simple: they're a factor now in a way they simply weren't then, even though product quality in the aftermarket has drastically improved. 

Darren Dellavechia and his father felt the pressure from dealerships as well, but they viewed the threat differently from each other. “Dealers introduced an option to lease their vehicles, this was something new and it quickly became very popular.  The maintenance, repairs, and parts for lease vehicles were now covered under the lease and performed by the dealer.  Of course, those repairs were done with OE parts.  Aftermarket parts began to lose market share due to several reasons and it was there that we shared different senses of urgency.” 

Epilogue 

Jim’s last day as the owner of parts stores was more triumph and relief than sadness. He took a couple years off and became…drum roll please…a ski bum. He worked the ticket window part-time at Solitude Ski Resort for minimum wage and a season pass and he skied every day. The parts of his brain reserved for inventory and receivables gave way to snow conditions. After the skiing, he became an independent manufacturer’s representative, which was more lucrative than working at the ski resort and owning auto parts stores combined, and he was still able to control his own destiny. 

I've been in this industry long enough to know that the people in it are scrappy, practical, and more interested in solving the problem in front of them than in too much theorizing about the problem.

The business my father built is long gone. But I'm still here, writing about an industry that got into my blood so early I can't imagine it otherwise, which, I suppose, was exactly what he was afraid of, and exactly what he was proud of, depending on the day he was asked.