One thing for sure, if anyone wants to start a ruckus on the glassBYTEs.com™/AGRR forum, all one has to do is to wave the ‘bloody shirt” and there are many ways to do it.
The battle lines have long been drawn between “Indie” versus corporate and another subset to that division is production shops over what I call boutique ones.
It is a given that many people from all sectors of the auto glass industry monitor our forum. While it has been a “meeting place” of sorts for many small shops to exchange ideas and opinions, many Belron and Diamond-Triumph employees have made it a habit to read and express their own opinions on the state of AGRR business and also to defend or promote their employers. In short, there is much too much division and too little unity. There has to be common ground somewhere.
On what can we all agree? The installs certainly have become more challenging on many models. The tight flush-mounted moulding-less design is becoming more commonplace on today’s cars. The American public is going to get a very upfront look at auto glass installation practices over the next decade. Perimeter paint will be certainly be put into jeopardy during removal.
Corrosion from unprimed scratches will then become visible, putting more and more pressure on us to act like professionals and to slow down in order not to damage a car during installation. I don’t think an application of a generic moulding will always be accepted as a cover piece to hide said damage.
Unfortunately (and it is sad to say) the quality of replacement glass has dropped significantly and most likely due to the pressure by imports and certainly from said imports as well. To paraphrase a famous courtroom uttering: “I think it fits, so it must be shipped.” Many of us are finding that no brand of glass provides consistent fits and distortion-free vision. Nobody likes re-dos, postponements and fiddling with something that should have been right from the start.
Profit-hungry corporations have skewed our national sense of values, which drastically have lowered our universal sense of what constitutes quality.
Just the word “hack” conjures up debate among the industry. I neither want to start a fight nor a definition-seeking discourse. I want to raise somehow the level of professionalism within our industry. One thing is for sure—hacks are everywhere, in corporate businesses, mom and pops, regionals and one-man mobiles. In many ways, due to the ‘easy entry’ nature of our industry, removing those people and companies that represent the worst in our trade will be the greatest challenge this industry faces. If we don’t make the effort to do so, like ice on airplane wings, this industry will crash and burn. From this person’s viewpoint, we are not exactly gaining altitude.
As it was once said, “Can’t we all get along?” During the Civil War, it was often reported that even after a day of bitter and bloody fighting, soldiers from both sides would meet, exchange coffee and tobacco, even help nurse the other’s wounds. I think we can learn from that example as well. We are first of all a fraternity bonded by the trials and tribulations of having to endure a hard trade and being a professional about it. Any of you that have had to remove a late-model Dodge pickup slider without damaging paint know what I mean. It is in all of our interests to have standards and to meet them on a daily basis. The very last thing we need is to have the stigma of bad workmanship stamped upon an entire industry. Ben Franklin noted at the signing of the Declaration of Independence “we hang together or most assuredly we will hang separately.” The same applies to our craft as well.
