There used to be a person in a brown coat with couple of pens and a short steel ruler in their brest pocket. You’d walk into the shop clutching a stub of pipe, and he’d take one look and say, “Ah, that’s your blue 12mm — John Guest push-fit, that is. You’re wanting to run it to a Shurflo pump? Right, you’ll need one of these, and one of these.” Then, before you’d even asked, “And the tap’s 10mm, so these fittings for that end.” Sorted. Home in twenty minutes. Water running by teatime.
Now I sit down to order a few parts for the campervan’s water system and drown in noise. Fourteen listings for the same fitting, none of them quite matching the photo. Reviews arguing about whether it fits. “Frequently bought together” suggesting a garden hose and a phone case. No brown coat. No, “you don’t want that one, this is way better value.” Just me, a tape measure, and a growing suspicion I’m about to order the wrong thing twice.
And the catalogues are a shambles. Parts filed under nothing sensible, categories that overlap or contradict, the same fitting listed three ways with three different names. The wrong photos attached to parts. Then there’s the shop’s AI chat assistant, which is somehow worse than useless. Ask it a straight question and it invents an answer — confidently recommending part numbers that don’t exist, assuming you’ve got a setup you’ve never mentioned, and merrily sending you toward fittings that were never made. At least the old catalogue just sat there and let you be confused in peace. This thing manufactures confusion and hands it to you with a smile.
And if you reach for the phone, the lines lead to call centres where the staff can’t possibly know — or for that matter have ever seen — a thousandth of the parts the catalogue carries.
The parts were never the hard bit. The knowledge was. And somewhere between the counter and the checkout, we lost the man who had it.
Some nostalgia there, Webbs of Cambridge was outstanding in that department.