Blue-Light Basalt?

But how about Costco?
Costco. The home of giant jars of pretzels, cheese Danish in 24 packs, those tasty fresh-roasted chickens and ….
… Stone. Marble tile, to be specific, ready for loading in those giant carts to wheel to the checkstand and give the product loaders a king-sized backache. It’s cash-and-carry goods in neat-and-tidy cardboard boxes.
I wasn’t on the prowl for new stone retailers when I spied the warehouse-club stone. I just wanted some fresh Fuji apples.
OK, I could just go to the local supermarket for a couple of nice Fujis. However, my late mother – who graduated from high school during the Great Depression – was a person for whom no bargain was too low. Had she lived to guide a shopping cart through a warehouse discounter, she would have been in high glory.
I inherited (along with her small hands and feet) her strong, near-manic sense of thrift. However, the years of consuming private-label canned vegetables and off-brand foods in my youth drives me to find better value for my dollar, which is why I travel every 10 days or so to my local Costco for a 12-pack of jumbo Fuji apples (which are, by the way, consistently delicious).
Being a keen shopper – again, something implanted in my genes – I’m quick to notice any changes at a regular retail stop, so I spotted the marble within a few minutes of entering the store. Half of one aisle now featured flooring products, including 12” X 12” Chinese tiles in a reasonable facsimile of the ubiquitous Crema Marfil. Nothing fancy, but it’s natural stone.
Costco didn’t offer anything else for installation, like a thinset or even a trowel. The store had two crates of boxed tile at the display, and one already was empty to the last level of product.
Admittedly, I shop at a Costco that’s a bit tonier than others. The guy ahead of me at the checkout rolled out with a cart full of paper plates and cups, which he then proceeded to load into the area behind the driver’s seat of a yellow Ferrari F430.
And, seeing stone tile stacked up for sale at a retail store is nothing new, unless you’ve never set foot into a Home Depot or Lowe’s in this century. At Costco, though, there’s one thing missing – the sign reminding any DIYer that help’s available.
Any major home-improvement center can, at a price, send someone along to do the dirty job (to a consumer) of installation. Not at Costco. Just pile the tiles in the cart along with the sushi party boat and the 70-oz. Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats®, and what you do with them after leaving the store is your business, pal.
It’s also ours, in that it’s another way that we’re gaining market share and losing margin simultaneously. Everybody’s getting in the stone act, which gives the public the notion that stone isn’t an exclusive luxury for the idle rich anymore. Seeing it everywhere, including a stop like Costco, gives the impression that anyone can slap this stuff down.
It’s a problem that continues to build. The stone industry is far from unique – just about every trade went through it in the past 50 years – but how we deal with it now is the issue we need to face.
The progression is familiar. Not all that long ago, stone was a completely full-service industry; a customer went to a stone business, came to a decision (from the shop’s selection) on what stone to use for a project, and then let the company finish the entire job and provide ongoing service.
The next step came with selective service. A customer may end up going to one place to pick out the stone (the supplier), another to produce and install (the fabricator), and yet another for continuing service (maintenance/restoration).
Now, there’s basically self-service stone by actually buying material directly, where consumers install it themselves (with tile) or have arranged services through a general Big-Box retailer. Stone work becomes equated with getting new carpet or having a ceiling fan installed, and shops have a hard time finding a profit center when they don’t get a chance to mark up material and cut service costs to keep machines and employees working.
Since we’re not going to control material availability and prices – those ships are still sailing from around the globe – the stone trade needs to move the end users’ focus on value from cost to craft. We may not be able to move the clock back to total full-service, but we must show people that there’s more than a square-foot price and a palette of a dozen stones.
It’s something that, in their own ways, a variety of groups are working on within the industry, whether it’s the hands-on details of the Stone Fabricator’s Alliance, the branding of the National Stone Council, or the accreditation from the Marble Institute of America. However, they all can’t go charging off independently. Nobody should have total control over all of this, but everyone needs to acknowledge and reference each other’s work.
None of us can afford to let stone become a low-cost trade. We already know that what we do can’t be sold like a sack of apples. And it’s time for us to prove our worth.
Emerson Schwartzkopf can be reached at emerson@stonebusiness.net.