Your best counter guy is retiring. His knowledge doesn't have to.

Independent supply houses win on one thing the nationals and Amazon can't copy: people who know the product. The counter veteran who can cross a discontinued fitting from memory. The inside sales rep who catches a code issue before it costs the contractor a failed inspection.

That advantage is aging out. Across plumbing, HVAC and PVF distribution, 101,000 employees, 27% of the industry's workforce, are expected to retire within ten years (ASA labor study). As one industry veteran put it: that knowledge lives entirely in their head, and when they retire, it walks out the door with them.

Meanwhile, the questions are getting harder, not easier. The A2L transition alone rewrote the catalog with thousands of new SKUs, new matchups and new install rules, and put equipment costs up 40%+ since 2019. Every regulatory cycle punishes whoever's product knowledge updates slowest.

And your contractors won't wait. 83% already buy from three or more suppliers, and 70% shift spend the moment a supplier underperforms (HARDI Voice of the Contractor). Every unanswered phone, every "let me check and call you back," every green kid at the counter is share-of-wallet leaking to the competitor down the street, or to Ferguson.

Distributors tell us the same thing HARDI's data shows: the counter relationship is why contractors stay. We agree, and that's exactly why it can't depend on one person's memory or one branch's staffing.

Blocks makes the veteran the teacher instead of the bottleneck: his cross-references, his job-site war stories, his "never pair those two" rules get captured while he's still around to laugh about them. Every rep, at every branch, on every shift then answers like him. New hires ramp in weeks because they've got the old-timer in their ear. And your best people finally get off the routine questions and back to the work that actually grows accounts.