happy suddenly-problematic-federal-holiday day to my US friends, and happy a-normal-day-in-a-civilized-society day to everyone else (please don't hornypost on main)

i have a thesis thread for you.

websites are going away.

i'd rather kill the radio and listen to the rain hit.

I WANT AN ASSISTANT THAT MAKES IT SO I DON'T EVER HAVE TO BROWSE HOME DEPOT'S SHITTY FUCKING WEBSITE EVER AGAIN.

it's a real, real problem.

i understand: Home Depot wants ad space. promotional description sections. they want dark patterns and red sale banners and they want their hooks in me. my email, my location, how pregnant i am. they want to figure out all my details so they can serve me what they think i need.

but i just need 6mm M3-threaded screws and standoffs, and a *fucking* hot glue gun.

y'know why? 

because some DIPSHIT on the internet modeled their DIY project on non-standard hardware sizes and now *i* have to figure it the fuck out.

SO THERE'S AN INCENTIVE PROBLEM.

i don't need to know that Home Depot stocks hobbyist electronics, even though that's the project i'm working on.

but Home Depot needs to figure out who i am. 

and the longer i spend wandering their website NOT finding what i need, the more they learn about what i'm interested in so that they can target me with upsells and other shiny toys.

and that's CERTAINLY true if i'm looking for a zero margin item like screws. Home Depot has functionally zero incentive to tell me they stock those. better to frustrate me and force me to come look for them in-store myself.

and then i'm hooked for SURE.

it's all very gross and i hate it. 

but it hasn't always been like this.

THE HARDWARE STORE USED TO BE A SOCIAL CLUB.

i used to spin on the barstool at the checkout counter while grandpa would argue with... not even employees? sometimes just random people? about how this-or-that coupler wasn't fitting on the battery in some guy's tractor because the manifold something-or-other needed to be spark-plugged. 

(i'm still not a mechanic)

because that's how you GOT information back in the day!

you *worked* for it!

you asked around! made friends with people you sometimes didn't like! swallowed your pride and took a class at the technical college! you went to the fucking *library*.

you couldn't figure shit out by staying at home all day, so you went out into the world and you talked to people that knew.

AND IF YOU KNEW?

it was your job to *tell everyone that you did.*

because then people came to YOU! they came to YOUR STORE, and they told you EXACTLY what their problem was, and then you didn't have to run analytics, you KNEW what people were looking for and what products to stock and how best to serve them!

why does Amazon need to track my every click?

BECAUSE NO ONE IS ASKING THEM FOR ADVICE.

ahhh, those were the days huh? 

before convenience? 

now everything's convenient, but ain't nobody know shit.

we got over-indexed on scale, and... intelligence didn't. 

but the world is changing again. 

we have... pretty real intelligence in our pockets, and the cost of communication is about to fall riiiight off a cliff.

WHAT IF I COULD TELL HOME DEPOT THAT I'M DEALING WITH SOME DIPSHIT ON THE INTERNET?

or, better yet, what if the dude in my glasses that's been helping me translate these instructions from Mandarin could tell Home Depot that the plastic post mount for my 6mm standoffs has an interior diameter of 2.154 mm, but that everything in my hardware kit is 2.48mm across and hexagonal.

and then maybe Home Depot and the dude in my glasses can "reason" about what the best solution is, Home Depot can tell me that that no shop in their right mind would stock M3-threaded screws and standoffs (idk if that's true, i'm just salty i misread the instructions), they can both determine that the 3D model doesn't have enough tolerance to be modified to accommodate my M2 standoffs, and then finally advise me to give up the quest to fix this shit and just go straight for the fucking glue gun.

what if that?

what if Home Depot got a granular, detailed, first person narrative of EXACTLY who their customer was, solved their problem, upsold them...

... and i never had to step foot on their absolutely *ass* website to do it?

what.

if.

THAT?

WEBSITES ARE GOING AWAY

if i'm lucky, i guess.

because Home Depot is not incentivized to be helpful. it's designed to sell shit.

and yeah, so was grandpa's hardware store — but he couldn't fuck with you on some "oh i don't KNOW if i have that in stock, why don't you look around?" bullshit if you asked him about M3 screws and standoffs.

DO YOU REMEMBER THE SEARS CATALOG?

if you do, i'm so so sorry to bring it up. that's even before my time.

see i'm a tail-end millenial: one of the last to know what life was like before the internet, and then to grow up while it changed the world. i remember newspapers, and phone books, and the local grocery stores even used to *mail* coupons to every single house in the goddamn town. 

yep. 

life was reeeeeeally different before information was free.