The Societal Trade-Offs of Advancing Technology

The Devolution of Parts Counter Clerks Signifies Doom for Civilization Writ Large

I write this as a car guy, but I’m sure the underlying principles apply to many different hobbies and vocations.

I don’t like to shop at ChiCom-Mart (I prefer to get groceries at the local Farmer’s Market), but circumstances the other day favored it. While I was there, I went to the automotive section to get oil and a filter for one of my vehicles which is about due for a change.

They no longer have a book to look up what filter fits your application (and no, I don’t have the part number memorized for all my vehicles). They also no longer have the little computers which serve the same purpose.

They must expect us to look it up on “smart” phones, sez I. So I enter search terms including the make/model/year and engine size. I get back a bunch of advertisements to buy a filter online. I go to a couple of those sites, but they don’t divulge the part #. I’m standing there in front of shelves loaded with hundreds of oil filters in dozens of varieties, and I hold in my hand an electronic device with 100,000 times the computing power of what put a man on the moon, but I am as hapless as Joe Biden facing a flight of stairs.

I have stuff to do and am hoping to make this go quick. I march over to the counter (which is usually unmanned, but it’s worth a try). There’s an employee there, but he’s busy with a customer.

Waste time standing in line, or waste time trying to get a simple, accurate answer from my “smart” phone?

I go back to the filter shelves, unlock my phone again and scroll down to other search results. The sites I go to are SEO optimized, but absolutely useless for telling me the correct part #. I don’t need to see videos of how to perform a friggin’ oil change on some import, nor did I search for that. I change search terms and try again. Same issues. I go to the ChiCom-Mart website and search for the vehicle’s filter. It is as helpful as your average DMV employee.

I return to the counter. There are now several people waiting in line to speak to the human being who works there. Back to the shelves. By now I’m pretty steamed.

I go to the Fram website. Despite having typed in the specific engine and vehicle (a GM) application to search for, Fram shows me results for BMWs, Fords, and motorcycles.

What the hell? Are website designers purposely building internal search engines designed to send customers on wild goose chases? Are coders all DEI hires, now?

That is approximately when I muttered a curse against ChiCom-Mart and the idiots hired to build websites, and burned rubber out of there for the nearest parts store.

Parts stores.

After my experience in ChiCom-Mart’s automotive section, I couldn’t help revisiting my lament over the devolution of the auto parts industry. And not even the fact that the industry presents the current-year car guy with about as much “choice” as we are presented in current year “elections.” (I can choose to repair my vehicles with either cheap communist garbage, or expensive communist garbage.) No, I’m referring to the people who work in this industry.

The America I was born into was already going downhill fast; but even what I experienced was so much better than what we have today. Case in point: shadetree wrenching on your street machine. You could do it pretty much anywhere without harassment, and in fact, if you did it in a rural area, somebody would probably pull over to see if you needed help. I used to do the same when I saw somebody with their hood open on the side of the road. (The last time I did it was about 2004.)

Whether repairing or modifying my American Steel, part of the process was always a trip to the parts store. If it was logistically feasible, I would try the speed shops first. The guys behind the counter at those places were the elite. (The speed shops almost all closed down during the late ‘90s—including Super Shops.) Next on the list was Car Quest. If one of those wasn’t nearby, then I’d go to Nationwise or one of the other generic stores. Even there, the guys behind the counter knew at least something about cars.

If the part you needed wasn’t exotic, you could just tell the guy what you needed, they would walk back through the shelves, pluck it, return to the counter, tell you how much it cost, take your cash, return your change with your part, and you were on your way. (Unless they were curious about your project and there were no other customers in line—in which case you might get trapped into a conversation which led to bench racing.)

I remember when the decline became obvious to me. I walked into an Auto Zone or some such soulless generic business, stepped up to the counter and told the guy, “I need a fuel pump for a small block Mopar. High performance, if you have one.”

Dude starts tapping on the computer keyboard. “What vehicle is this for?”

“Small block Mopar,” I repeated, thinking he might be as hard-of-hearing as I am, or maybe my mongrel accent threw him off.

“I need to know what car it’s for,” he said.

No, he didn’t need to know. The type of vehicle didn’t matter. The same fuel pump fit the 273, the 318, the 340…probably even the 360 and Slant Six—though I can’t swear to it now, you can bet I knew it then. Besides, gearheads like me were infamous for swapping in hopped-up powerplants of a displacement that was not factory-stock for the specific model, sub-model and option package of the vehicle in question. Depending on my mood on the day I had such an encounter, I might explain this to the parts counter ignoramus, patiently answer all his irrelevant questions, or walk out of the store to find a competitor with car guys manning the counter. The first couple times this happened, I probably answered all the irrelevant queries.

If the engine wasn’t offered stock in the vehicle in question, I would mention a vehicle that did offer it from the factory.

Tappity-tappity-tap on the keyboard. “Is that standard or automatic transmission?”

Made absolutely no difference, but I would answer.

Tappity-tappity-tap. “Single or dual exhaust?”

Sigh. “Dual.”

Tappity-tappity-tap. “Two or four-barrel carburetor?”

Here I probably rolled my eyes. “Four.”

Tappity-tappity-tap. “Two or four wheel drive?”

This one really annoyed me, unless the vehicle was a truck. But I swear I’ve had these yo-yos ask me this when the vehicle was a normal passenger car.

Tappity-tappity-tap. “Manual or power steering?”

“Air conditioning?”

“Bench or bucket seats?”

“AM/FM radio or tape deck?”

“Standard or deluxe ash tray?” Tappity-tappity-tap.

Ahem. Perhaps I exaggerated a wee bit there toward the end. But it reflects the ridiculous nature of the interaction, as I saw it.

Auto parts stores were replacing car guys with ignorant dweebs (and dweebettes) who were incapable of serving customers without a computer to tell them what to do. And the best auto parts stores (speed shops and mom-&-pop businesses) were all being replaced by these Big Box chain stores selling cheap communist garbage and staffed with meat puppets. (Nevermind what was happening to cars themselves.)

The whole aftermarket industry, and the high-performance niche with it, was spiraling down to bureaucratic hell before my eyes.

When I first began wrenching, the very best source for hi-po parts were the mail-order catalogues. P.A.W. (Performance Automotive Wholesale) was the best, if you could wait for the delivery and had the bucks to buy the part in question.

A friend brought Summit Racing to my attention later on. They were a thriftier alternative to P.A.W., and I became such a prolific customer of theirs that they sent me at least half a dozen free hats over the course of a couple years. I probably should have seen it as a red flag when I saw a Summit Racing commercial while watching Top Fuel races on cable. They were going big. That meant they were trading their appreciative, knowledgeable, motivated niche clientele for a huge, plain-Jane chunk of the population.

I did recognize the red flag while reading the enthusiast magazines I subscribed to back in the day: it was a full page ad that ran in pretty much all the magazines I read. I think it was Summit, but it might have been a competitor, if they still had any competition at the time. (Jeggs survived at least for a while—maybe some others that didn’t specialize in specific brands, too.)

The ad had kind of a split-screen contrasting who you would be talking to if you called to order a part from their company, or a typical gearhead business. On one side, with phone to ear, was a representative of My People: a tousle-haired young dude with an open inventory book in front of him, scribbling on a note pad. He sat at a scuffed, stained parts counter in a cluttered workspace. He wore geek glasses broken in the middle and taped back together. Grease-stained clothes and skin would have better represented the stereotype, but the photographer probably couldn’t convince the model to get dirty. On the other side was the Modern Customer Service Professional, a middle-aged domesticated Yuppie sitting in a nice, clean office cubicle with a fancy telephone headset, typing (with clean, manicured hands) on a computer keyboard, wearing a button-up shirt, tie, and a friendly smile as he looked up a part for you (which was a completely abstract concept to him, no doubt).

My reaction to this ad was: “What the hell are they thinking?”

Why would I want to order parts from the ignorant dweeb with the manicured hands who can’t accomplish a bowel movement without a computer to guide him through the process? If I wanted that, I would shop at the generic auto parts franchises down the road. Let me talk to the dude with the tape on his glasses!

Obviously, they didn’t consider my business all that valuable. What occurs to me now is they were catering to the Boomers who used to be gearheads but no longer street-raced or used their hot rod as a daily driver. They occasionally bent a wrench on their pristine Garage Queen with the immaculate paint job and drove it maybe three times a year to show off…but only in perfect weather.

The generation which once said, “Never trust anyone over 30!” was now over 30, and who they didn’t trust (or appreciate very much, either) were young working-class gearheads like me who didn’t own a house, much less a garage, daily-drove our street machines to work and everywhere else, wrenched wherever we had to, walked or caught rides to the parts store with grease under our fingernails, stained into the pores of our skin (and, of course, our T-shirts and jeans), with scabs, scars, and some fresh gashes on our hands and arms where blood and petroleum products intermingled.

I’m a dying breed, I realized. Collectors were driving the price of musclecars out of my reach. Boomers were too domesticated (and old) to live the gearhead lifestyle or empathize with those who did. Millennials couldn’t change their own tire or give a jump-start. And it would only be a matter of time before Summit “Racing” was just another generic aftermarket parts business, where pierced-face teens and their single Karen moms alike shopped for windshield-wiper blades on their late model Nissan (but called on a Certified Mechanic in a Nice Clean Auto Repair Facility when it needed more serious attention).

Computers were supposed to make life better, easier, more convenient. The Internet was supposed to make people smarter. Boy, did we get sold a bill of goods. The recent Crowdstrike event should have caused people to reevaluate how dependent we’ve become on technology which could have given reasonably intelligent people a helpful tool, but instead have effectively replaced the human brain—which is a far superior CPU, if fed well, maintained and exercised, than the bestest, fastest, costliest omni-core “smart” phone that will ever be invented. Any desktop Winblows computer eats 3/4 of your RAM just being turned on and sitting there, before you ever assign it a single task. And now Microsux (and probably Crapple, too) are being loaded with spyware so that Big Brother can monitor everything you see, say, or study.

I am prone to exaggeration, but I’m not exaggerating about “smart” phones replacing the human brain. Try having an intelligent conversation with the average young person today. They are incapable of critical, or even independent, thought.

Technology has contributed to our descent into the present dystopia.

If you don't believe me, try to find the right oil filter for your daily driver at ChiCom-Mart.

Hey, all this pontification about car culture back in the day has brought back lots of memories. And that leads me to share a link to what I consider the greatest gearhead novel ever written. Here’s a link: Fast Cars and Rock & Roll If you would like more car guy-friendly entertainment in your diet, show the author some love afterwards with a rating, review, and some word-of-mouth.