FLASHBack 49 Years Ago This Month
F orty-nine years ago this month, in July of 1972,
we celebrated the 50th anniversary of BPD’s sister publication, The Western Lumber & Building Materials Merchant, with an array of history-minded and forwardlooking features. (And, if you can do the quick math, you’ll realize our magazines will be celebrating a major milestone in 2022.) The lead story was a forecast by Pete Niebling, western manager for the North American Wholesale Lumber Association, who peered ahead into the thendistant decades, attempting to predict what the industry’s distribution chain would look like in the next decade. You judge how prescient he was: • Fewer geographic separations. Niebling anticipated “a further decline in provincialism in the U.S. Mass communications and mobility will continue to dilute environmental influences that are local in nature.” The ability to look beyond the barriers of local borders would provide lumber companies with access not just to larger markets, but also to more sources and a wider base of knowledge. One consequence, he thought, would be greater conformity among marketing and operations, as industry best practices became better known.
THE JULY 1972 issue, sponsored by Rounds Lumber Co., celebrated the publication’s 50th anniversary.
• A transformed retailing structure. Niebling explained that traditionally retailing depends on “derived demand” (in other words, the consumer’s desires). Consequently, the pace of change among retailers is often dictated by the wants of the customer. Change, he admitted, was not one of the lumber industry’s strong points—perhaps, he reasoned, because its raw resource (the tree) was slow in growing and little in changing. Yet Niebling was confident greater change was coming. “We should not underestimate consumerism and its growing influence,” he wrote. • Far fewer unaligned and wholly independent dealers. Niebling noted the “increasing concentration of retailers,” notably the fast expansion of home improvement chains and the rush for independents to join franchises and purchasing groups. As a representative of wholesalers, he did fear that as retailers grew larger and more affiliated, they were more likely to seek to buy direct from manufacturers.
MY, HOW INDUSTRY training materials have changed. Back in 1972, APA offered its state-of-the-art plywood sales training program on cassette tapes and 35mm slides.
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• New technology would come—with limits. Niebling predicted that while more automation was inevitable, customers might push back. “As technology increases, machines and sophisticated computers can help the large companies in these costs,” Niebling wrote. “However, today we see the consumer asking for more personal attention than machines can give. The quality of life along with the quality of bigness is seriously being questioned by much of society today. It remains to be seen whether our society will opt for dull, highlyorganized conformity or will demand higher quality, better service, and the ‘pleasures of difference.’” He noted that wholesalers remained optimistic for the future, evidenced by the massive upsurge in the formation of new forest products wholesale firms over the preceding 18 months.
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