As the dotcom recession slipped into our rear-view mirror, who was to know that Amazon would mature into the place to buy almost anything.

Ahh, the holidays. The time when families and friends gather to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah and the New Year. What a special time...unless you are in the building industry. You are swamped with projects, struggling to get any product you can as your job timelines start to slip into 2022.

The internet is just as accessible to a builder with an office one block from your showroom as it is for a builder hundreds of miles away. Popular e-commerce sites do not think of regional boundaries when they create business plans. These digital companies focus on market segments that can be located anywhere — anywhere the internet reaches.

The old adage that people need to see an elegant faucet in order to appreciate it and to specify it has evolved into a myth wrapped up into a ribbon of hope.

I was visiting Salem Plumbing Supply in Beverly, Massachusetts, for the first time and had not a clue where to go. As I approached a counter sales person, Ralph Sevinor, the owner and one fine gentleman, saw me and grabbed my arm and said, “I want to show you something.

The best profile for a showroom salesperson is not the high-energy type “A” personalities that focus on getting the sale.

My takeaway from the barrage of stories analyzing the Reddit group that banded together to create noise in the stock industry is that this time, the group hit the market at the right time with the right story and, it seems, most of the people walked away with a profit.

Remember when you traveled to shop at your local shoe store? The salesperson guided you around the showroom and helped you select the shoes that were just the right look and then carefully measured your shoe size.

Wherever we turn, people are telling us that working from home and shopping on the Internet are becoming the new norms. Is that true? Not yet, but COVID-19 has required many of us to work out of our homes and forced us to navigate the virtual mall — the Internet.

Over the past five decades, showrooms have grown from necessary nuances to contributing profit centers. They have both helped and benefited from the story slowly leaking out that plumbing fixtures can be as elegant as Vladimir Kagan furniture creations.