A distributor once asked me why one of his customers, a crane builder, kept specifying hollow chrome plated rod when solid rod was cheaper and simpler to stock. He assumed the customer was overcomplicating things, but in fact the crane builder had good reasons: the hollow rod let him run hydraulic l
A stockist once called me upset that a batch of honed tube had "cost him money" even though the price per kilogram was exactly what he had agreed. When we worked through it, the issue was not the price but the weight: he had estimated his revenue from the theoretical weight of the tube, but the tube
A repair shop owner once showed me two chrome plated rods on his bench and asked which one he should re-chrome and which he should scrap. One had a light band of surface wear and a few shallow scratches; the other had a corrosion pit near the middle and a slight bow. To him they looked like similar
