With Mother’s Day approaching, I think it is about time that we in the auto glass business honor the person who truly looks out for us all throughout the year. With that said, let me start the tributes to a woman who certainly affects our livelihood, which would be that irascible but rarely predictable person, Mother Nature.
In a slumping economy, how many of my central and mountain time zone shopkeepers look to the skies and pray for rain? If it comes down in frozen balls, all the more to hope for. Include the Northeast in thanking the woman in charge when it comes to blizzards or sleet storms. With laminated glass, when the temperatures rise above 100 degrees, meets air conditioning or cold water, no doubt the windshield business improves. Am I suggesting that the auto glass industry needs natural disasters to prosper? No, but it certainly provides a stimulus plan that doesn’t require borrowing trillions of dollars.
Take the situation in Austin, Texas. It got hit with a horrific hailstorm last month. With little warning, the area got pelted with hail the size of golf balls. Tens of thousands of cars were damaged. One single dealership group had 1,700 cars that required repair of some kind. Glass replacement shops that were mired in the recession were swamped with work and still are. In some cases, it will be one of double duty. Since roof panels were not readily available, the broken glass was replaced only to be removed again when a body shop could reschedule the customer when time and materials became available. In situations like that, the trickle down effect becomes quite like a river. Glass distributors are swamped with orders that oftentimes require an out of area response. Obviously the ancillary supplies that are needed, like adhesives and molding, also spike in demand.
From a personal note, I have never experienced as a businessman the after effects of Mother Nature’s fury. Much of California is different. Earthquakes aren’t on the list of predictable natural events just yet. When the last big quake in 1989 hit Central California, most of the glass damage came from cars parked in people’s garages that had overhead storage.
Thankfully, many of the Golden State’s residents have little or no concept of driving in rain. Much of this is due to the state having what is called a Mediterranean climate whereby it only rains a few months of the year and not much at that. Where in many parts of this country, a quarter inch of rain is considered merely a passing shower to keep the dust down, that meager amount of precipitation causes widespread panic translating into numerous fender benders in this part of the world. The onset of our rainy season usually starts in late October and with it creates a mini-boom of tempered installs from those Californians who were enjoying our climate from an open air motoring perspective. Any sort of moisture does hasten the deterioration of our state’s once vaunted but now budget victimized freeways. As we may have once heard, it just takes one little pebble to make someone happy, especially if they are in the glass repair business.
The rest of the country certainly can appreciate the variety of dispositions Mother Nature and her relatives can deal to us. Jack Frost and Old Man Winter can certainly bring financial benefice along with installer misery trying to complete those repairs. This time of year, unfortunately to those living in “Tornado Alley,” it is one of wariness and potential danger that has no use for humor. The collision of the warming weather of summer with the remnant cold fronts of a hard winter is a source of deadly storms that create widespread property damage and death. I will admit an attempt at levity in this essay but as members of a community, we are as much victims as we are beneficiaries of any sort of weather related disasters. There is nothing as life altering as when your house and livelihood are laid waste by some natural calamity
With that said, it is a sad reflection of reality that we in the auto glass industry do benefit when Mother Nature visits us with her violent side. Some of our larger installation companies have response teams that can be dispatched to areas that have suffered large amounts of glass claims to supplement their own local resources along with garnering new installs. That is forward thinking, but I wonder, how deep or insidious can this planning can become? After all, how does a corporation go about hiring a hail-producing shaman? That would be an interesting Human Resources interview to observe. How do you try to validate a witch doctor’s powers or are they altered when relocated to Ohio or Belgium from New Guinea or Sierra Leone?
Still, the month of May is for Mom; yours, mine and our forever-omniscient Mother Nature. You just can’t leave her out of the mix. No doubt many of us in the industry are mindful of her impact on our business. One large question looms: How can we give her flowers when she already has a corner on the market?
