They Said What?

In the dimensional-stone trade – especially when it comes to countertop sales – customers are tough to hear. It’s not the din of CNC machines or angle grinders; we just don’t get a chance, outside of fussiness over seam placement or the ever-so-sought-after compliment, to get a line on client thoughts.

Customers, however, have some words for us, especially about our prime material. When it comes to granite, they have plenty of opinions.

Boy, do they ever.

Odds are that you don’t read Hooked on Houses, a well-written blog on, as you might guess, houses. I hadn’t heard of it either, until a link on my Twitter feed flashed by one day last month with an eye-catching question: “Are Granite Countertops on Their Way Out?”

The June 9 blog noted items with two magazine websites: Southern Hospitality cited trends being left behind, with granite countertops and maple cabinets being “overused as the builder’s basic of spec houses,” and Fine Home Building decreeing that “Granite Countertops Are So Last Decade.” (A quick aside from a peeved writer: Fine Home Building’s senior editor, Justin Fink, linked to one of my blogs on stone imports and called it a U.S. International Trade Commission report, which I didn’t appreciate.)

Hooked on Houses didn’t take any sides. The writer asked readers to chime in – and, as of two weeks later, 90 different people had their say.

The comments included plenty of pros and cons. Any stone fabricator could read a few of them and wonder how anybody could say such things. It’s important, though, to take heed of all the discussion, because this isn’t a group with a particular point to make; they’re mostly a collection of homeowners, and any one of them could easily be you next potential customer.

To start, some good news: Nobody mentioned the word radon. Or picoliters. Or the New York Times.

A few respondents offered the simple explanation that they just hated granite anyway, and good riddance. You can’t please everyone, and you’ll always have someone who won’t consider granite. Period.

A prevailing theme, though, from many agreed with the notion that granite may seem married to the Oughts, in that the stone was way overdone in the past decade. While fabricators certainly enjoyed the rush to granite, some customers found it way overdone, especially with new home construction.

Others cited problems in the visual aesthetics of granite they’re seeing in homes now up for sale. Some of the stone offers far too much movement or patterns that might’ve looked exciting on the slab and right after installation, but didn’t present a homey, lived-in look over the years.

Several home buyers in the past few years voiced their displeasure that builders offered countertop choices of granite or … granite. Customers who feel that something is being forced down their throats are going to have a bad taste about the product for a long, long time.

By and large, these customers proved to be no slouches in determining the types of granite that advance the droll, cookie-cutter look. When different people keep citing Uba Tuba, Baltic Brown and Santa Cecelia, you get the message that homeowners are as tired as many of the fabricators with the old standards.

Several respondents trotted out the old canard that granite’s porosity is a bit unsanitary for them in trapping bacterial growth. That’s a notion that the Marble Institute of America is still trying to put to rest, along with manufacturers offering anti-microbial treatments, but the argument is still sinking in with some customers.

So, if not granite, what surface would these consumers prefer? Not surprisingly, quartz ranked high, along with solid surface, laminate and butcher-block wood. (I should note here that, in my youth, I used to clean an old-fashioned butcher shop, and I don’t want to hear anything about the ease of keeping wood bacteria-free.)

However, a large number of those shying away from granite showed a preference for other natural stone. Soapstone appeared to be highly-favored (although not within most budgets), along with marble.

Sustainable/recycled-product surfaces also have their fans among the respondents, but not in large numbers. One consumer favoring the alternative products decried the carbon-footprint with the shipment of granite across the seas using the world’s “dirtiest fuel” – diesel may not be the cleanest, but it’s far from bituminous coal or spent fuel rods – but also had an excellent point in the amount of waste created in the chain from quarry to processor to fabrication shop to final product.

Concrete got a mixed reaction. Several homeowners loved the look of their countertops, but others predicted that the product would quickly look as dated as, well, granite.

Interesting opinions, but I can hear some fabricators saying that it’s only 90 or so folks spouting off on the topic. There’s also a reader poll with the blog, with the following results to the question that “Granite Countertops are:”

• “So last decade!” – 37%.
• “A classic design choice that will never look dated.” – 36%
• “Going to be popular in kitchen design for at least another decade.” – 26%

Total votes in the poll, after two weeks: 1,641. Now that’s a consumer response worth considering.

Hopefully, granite countertops won’t be linked in the minds of customers with the Decade of Excess, the Great Recession and the Wall Street Wipeout. The stone’s image in the market, though, may need a tune-up … because people are talking.

Emerson Schwartzkopf can be reached at emerson@stonebusiness.net. You can read his blog here at Stone Business Online and at stonebusinesseditor.wordpress.com. And don’t forget to keep up with Stone Business on Twitter and Facebook.

This article first appeared in the June 2010 print edition of Stone Business.

©2010, Western Business Media Inc.

Get the best in insightful and informed coverage of the stone industry every month with Stone Business magazine. Sign up for a free subscription (or renew your current account) and don’t miss a single issue – just click here.