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J.C.
Milliman
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Shifty's generator |
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The
Stovebolt Page |
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J.C.
Milliman
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Shifty's generator |
Our great society may well be in its death throes. And when the coffin is nailed shut, the nails used will have been supplied by the Evil Empire -- the National Hardware Store Chain.
It all started when Shifty came by asking for help in replacing his newly deceased generator. Sunday, three days after Hurricane Isabel rolled through and made a shambles of Southern Maryland's antiquated and haphazard electrical grid, was not the optimal day to be generator shopping.
You can't blame Shifty for that, being a victim of cruel circumstance as it were. However, being the resourceful sort, I soon found a better answer than trying to buy a generator while the power was still on vacation in most of the region. We were going to borrow my brother-in-law's generator. Just one minor complication, though -- It was in Hyattsville. Roadtrip!
Once on the road, we heard a spot on the radio about a certain joint in Southern Maryland with generators in stock. Shifty was in luck and I might be spared the prospect of a death-risking foray to PG County via the Capitol Beltway! Goodness all around!
That's when the trouble started.
SEEgars and coffee in hand, we changed course and took the shortcut I knew to the unnamed-for-obvious-reasons generator purveyors. My first hint of trouble came as a big yellow sign that said, "Road Ends 1,500 Feet." What? To go back and take the long way would involve a 10-mile back track. We pressed on anyway. What were we thinking?
We weren't thinking. That was the problem. We had one thing on our minds, being jarheaded mono-tasking alpha males. Get the generator at all costs.
Soon, the "Road Closed" sign hove into view. Just beyond it lay the main highway we so desperately needed beckoning to us like a Homeric siren. The call was intoxicating. Turn around and drive another 15 or so miles just to get back to this same point, albeit on the other side of the Road Closed sign? So close, yet between us and the highway, festooned with warning tape and barricades, yawned a chasm where once the road was. Apparently, the road crews hadn't quite finished installing a culvert before Isabel came calling.
To the side, though, lay an alternate path obviously forged by equally desperate souls that led through the mud, across the railroad tracks, through more mud, over a couple of curbs and finally to the highway. Backtrack 15 miles or risk getting the Dodge dually stuck (again) and (again) calling Yoda and the Ford dually to come save us.
What a dilemma.
Somewhat later, we pulled into the generator place, having decided the coffee stains in the headliner added character to the truck.
It was a short visit.
I got an inkling of what was in store when, without even looking up or breaking the conversation he was having with a co-worker, the salesman grinned and handed us a flyer on the generators for sale. We scanned down the sheet. Five thousand watts, key start, 110/220, yadda yadda. All for the low, low price (drum roll) equivalent to the Gross National Product of Argentina! Stunned, we mumbled thanks and walked out.
"You know, I bought my '91 Saab for less than that," Shifty noted once his voice came back. I was still hyperventilating and couldn't respond. Little did we know we were only just getting started on our odyssey into understanding the downfall of Western Culture.
We resigned ourselves to the trip to Hyattsville, which in retrospect turned out to be pretty uneventful.
On the return trip, however, we decided to find the makings of an extension cord so Shifty could run 220 from the generator to the house breaker box via the dryer plug. All we needed was a NEMA L14-20 plug for the generator side of the cord. All we needed, indeed! It sounded so miniscule, so unworthy of note. Ha!
I could understand why generators might be in short supply immediately before and after a hurricane. Businesses can't be expected to keep vast stocks of high-dollar (relatively speaking that is, gouging businesses aside), low-demand (again, usually) items. But you would think these fancy national chain climate-controlled indoor lumber yards would carry plenty of simple items like NEMA L14-20 plugs, wouldn't you? Well, we did. Silly us.
And, with a hurricane coming with at least a week's worth of notice, you'd think these fancy indoor lumber yards would ping their national buying and supply chains to stock up on generator-related items. Call us naive, but we did. We stopped into the first one we came to. Not only were the plugs out of stock, someone had even pried the display model off the bin it was bolted to. It was to be the same story at every one of those national chain climate-controlled indoor lumberyards (with national buying and distribution networks) we visited between Hyattsville and Lexington Park.
And we stopped at every one. Same story.
These national chain (did I mention they were climate controlled?) indoor lumberyards boasted of being able to meet our every need in one stop so much better than the mom and pop hardware stores they've "economically cleansed" from the markets they've conquered. Yet here was a simple case of them failing miserably to anticipate a demand the rest of us saw coming a week away.
Shifty had a generator at least, but had to settle for running a hydra-like network of extension cords into the house. This courtesy of the "Big Box" chain store who's remote buying agents and executives obviously had no more of a clue about their customer base than they did about the ancient ritual practices of the Anasazi Indians.
If you watched "X-Files" you'd know who they were. Both the Anasazi AND the people responsible for this failure of capitalism's so-called "Free Market." These national chains must be the work of a vast Government-Alien conspiracy to destroy our culture. I'm not paranoid, you should come see the black helicopters hovering over my house day and night. I digress.
There was, however, one place I know of that had NEMA L14-20 and L14-30 plugs in stock. Because I don't want you mobbing my local source of all that is still good and right, I won't identify it. We'll just call it "Milt's," okay. As you may know, Milt's (not it's real name) is a good example of a dying breed -- the Mom and Pop-run establishment run from the home and catering to the real needs of it's customers. No glitzy showroom of yuppie accessories meets you there, just the proprietor or one (or two or three or four or five....) of the boys to help you with a selection of chain saws, generators, concrete saws, brush cutters, mowers etc.
Again, nothing fancy, just old-fashioned service that's seemingly so out of fashion these days. When you buy from a Mom and Pop, you aren't also paying for the showroom climate control and exorbitant salary for a corporate board of directors out of state somewhere.
Well, I'm wrong -- in the summer, they open the doors so the climate can come in and out, and in the winter, they close the doors so it can't. That's climate control, I guess. You get the picture.
Milt's, like other Mom and Pop's around the country who get fewer and fewer every day thanks to predatorial super chains, understood its customers and successfully anticipated the need. The place stayed open during the hurricane and kept needed items in stock thanks to regular runs to Pennsylvania and elsewhere for resupply (good job, Chris!).
While you and I were huddled in the basement, fumbling with our generators and cursing the darkness, the folks at Milt's -- Randy, Anthony, Shawn, Dwayne, Harry, Eugene, Bart, Milt, Chris and others (not their real names, either of course) -- valiantly stood up to Isabel and kept meeting customer needs for chainsaws, generators and plugs until about 6 p.m. or so. And did so following the storm, too.
The big national chain of fancy climate controlled indoor lumber yards couldn't keep a single high-demand item in stock but Mom and Pop, working out of a barn, could?
How sorry is that?
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