Mom and pop stores acquired and catered to their clique of regular shop owners and treated DIYers like unwelcome annoyances charging them double what the shops paid and as stated above they closed at about 5:00 on weekdays and if they opened on the weekend it was only until 12:00 on Saturday. Pitt Hyde recognized the DIY market was being under served and jumped in to cash in.
If I get the sense a business is treating me as an unwelcome annoyance, I probably won’t be back, unless they are literally the only business that can serve my needs for the particular task at hand . . . and that’s usually not the case, because there are almost always alternatives
Not all are like that Rod, and some still exist. My favorite parts store is Union Auto Parts in Tupelo, MS. Real nice guys. They used to give me a discount because our company bought a lot of shop supplies from them for the maintenance department. I didn’t ask for the discount, but I didn’t turn it down either.
I thought I recalled you mentioning you lived in MS. So a shameless plug for them if you’re ever in that area.
Ehh, we do some business with the chain stores but not the same way you guys off the street do. We don’t walk in or call up and ask for a water pump for a 2001 Ford Integra 1.9 TDI and pay cash for it.
I had my own shop for 8 years. Easily 70% of my purchases were from 3 local suppliers, 2 of whom you never heard of and couldn’t buy from if you wanted to. They were wholesale only and unless you had a state resellers permit you couldn’t do business there. The third was a local chain, but we didn’t deal with the front counter. They had commercial account staff, a separate phone number, and a separate sales area around back.
There’s a cost to all that, too. We don’t walk in and pay cash for our parts. We order using web-based programs, have them delivered, and carry a charge account with a balance that is paid the next month. It only makes sense that the cost for the distributor to maintain a delivery fleet and drivers, use third-party cataloging and ordering, and have an accounting department to manage billing is passed on to us, the shops purchasing the items.
That doesn’t mean we didn’t use quality parts. I was able to purchase ACDelco, Motorcraft, and Mopar from the same distributor that stocked the dealers. I could call the Dodge dealer and ask about a window switch, he would tell me he could have it that afternoon for $85, or I could have it delivered from the wholesaler to me for $75. I had a supplier that carried Mann, Hengst, Meyle, Aisin, Denso, and other import factory names. Over the last several years, companies like Autozone and Advanced Auto Parts have partnered with these wholesale only groups to offer the public parts that were previously dealer only.
For the record, online vendors like Rockauto and Amazon are pretty much irrelevant to the local independent repair shop. It’s one thing to plan to do your brakes next weekend and order parts ahead of time. But if your car is taking up space on my floor with a bad alternator or compressor, my goal (and yours too) is to get your car back in service as soon as possible, not wait three days for parts to arrive.
As a matter of fact @Scrapyard_John, the Union Auto Parts store in Tupelo seems to have evolved from D&S Auto Parts which dates back to the 1950s and I did quite a bit of business with them. The Union Auto Parts store in New Albany (Union County) bought out an old and well established parts store conglomerate of 45 Auto Parts and Tupelo Products while D&S sold out to become a Car Quest store but some how Union and Car Quest later merged into a store owned by the Union investors. All those former businesses were run on the GOOD OLE BOY system of taking care of commercial accounts and the current store for the most part continues that tradition and for that reason it has a great commercial business. The counter help is likely the most knowledgeable in the area.