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
A stockist in northern Europe once told me that his worst month was not the one with the fewest orders, but the one when three customers returned honed tube in the same week. All three complaints traced back to a single inbound shipment he had put straight onto the rack without checking. Bad tube ha
I once watched a distributor lose a good order because he could not answer a simple question. His customer, a cylinder rebuilder, asked what base steel and chrome thickness a batch of rod was, and the distributor did not know, because he had never really read the mill certificate that came with it.