Room to Groan

September 5, 2002

The other day, I saw what could be a fabricator’s nightmare: A slab of 1”-think granite. On a palette, ready for the truck.
At the front door of my local Home Depot.
As it turned out, that particular Big Orange Box wasn’t selling by the slab to anyone walking in the door. That’s a good sign for now, because stone fabrication is no place for amateurs – or anyone who acts like one.
In today’s stone trade, business continues to boom … and so does the competition. It’s a wide range of workmanship out there, from the old-line pro shop to solo operators selling out of the back of the truck in a home center’s parking lot (with, often enough, the quality to match).
Sharp talk about bad operators manages to pop up in just about every conversation I’ve had recently with fabricators and installers. More than ever, it’s a case of bad-apple-spoils- the-bunch syndrome, and probably with good cause.
Go to the customers out there, though – from the family remodeling the home to the large commercial contractor – and there’s plenty of grumbling about stone work as well. And, you might be surprised about what they’re saying.
Just telling a close friend or a casual acquaintance that you’re the editor of a stone publication seems to set off some common internal switch. Heads raise, eyes perk up, a big draw of air goes in the lungs, and then it starts: “Let me tell you about my kitchen remodeling that I just finished ….”
The curious thing is that, in hearing stories from neighbors at a local pool party to a transatlantic seatmate on a Madrid- Philadelphia flight, everybody liked the final product. None would trade their stone countertops and islands for any other surface.
And all found it to be the worst part of their entire remodeling experience.
Some customers complained of never getting the same answer twice on the timing of the installation. Others found that the answer to most of their questions invariably came out as “trust me,” and the response wore thin as days turned into weeks and months.
A few even found the craftsmanship of some fabricators so intense as to border on the obsessive.
“He really got, well, one with the stone,” says one person. “He did a good job, but he was kind of hard to deal with.”
It took a number of these encounters before I found someone complaining about a bad job. Unfortunately, it involved some 200 instances of defective work, all under one roof; apparently, one of the swank super-resorts in Las Vegas (which shall remain nameless) ended up with a peculiar 10-percent vacancy rate.
Check into one of the top-level hotels on The Strip, and you’ll find plenty of rooms without guests. It’s not a strange gambling superstition; the stone work in the bathrooms is faulty, causing unpleasant leaks for people expecting better for $200+ per day.
I’m sure that other customers – commercial and residential – have a beef with their stone work in the last few years. It’s the curse of a field where products, in a strange way, get too popular for their own common good.
Today, there are more sources, more choices and more surfaces for stone – and, with fabricators becoming their own import agents – more ways to deliver the goods. That adds up to larger overall inventory and a reduction of prices at the retail end with installed products.
This classic bit of free-market economics is tasty bait for anyone looking to pop in and take a piece of the action. Stone also shows a better margin than selling beef and turkey jerky at a roadside stand, and you don’t have to give away half of your production as free samples.
Stone’s popularity will bring some of the fly-by-night operators, but don’t expect all the new faces to work the shady sides of the deal. The increase in automated production, with CNC machines in particular, brings more efficiency to the shop’s workflow; that, in turn, makes stone attractive to companies and investors that see a manufacturing process instead of a craft.
The idea that the stone trade – really one of the oldest on Earth – may be going through growing pains is bizarre, but it’s also on the mark. As with anything else, everything eventually works out in time, but it’s worth noting a few things in the short-term.
With few standards to follow for stone, it’s tough to weed out the shoddy work at the local level. There’s the Marble Institute of America’s Design Manual and other standards adopted or in the works worldwide, but none of this is on the reading list of many building inspectors and other regulators.
Individual efforts around the United States, such as recent work by fabricators in the Phoenix area, are pushing evaluation standards for stone work. It’s an effort worth encouraging at trade shows and other events for the stone trade.
Educating the evaluators won’t make much sense without more educational opportunities for all facets of stone work. Yes, we’ll see more of the first-timers appear with more venues for learning – but would you rather have your competition get smarter, or produce disaster-zone jobs in stone that harms everyone’s reputation?
And, in a competitive market, it’s time to get a little self-education about dealing with customers. When there’s an increase in competition, end users – at a housing development or at a commercial site – are going to expect better service.
If they don’t get it from one vendor, they know others can (and will) step in. You may think your service is good, or at least OK, but clients may view things differently; if nothing else, it’s worth asking about it.
And then there’s that slab out at Home Depot. Turning the raw materials over to the consumer, at least, isn’t something we need to worry about. No homeowner wants to make slab-countertop fitting a DIY project
Then again, we could be wrong about that. It’s worth remembering the prediction a half-century ago from Thomas J. Watson, chairman of IBM, on the market for computers. His projected worldwide total sales number: Five.