Picking a banana off a tree in Costa Rica is hard work. Flying to Costa Rica to do it yourself is harder work. But picking a banana off the tree ... while it’s still green ... and then shipping it so it arrives yellow at the grocery store is the hardest work of all.

But that’s what plumbing and heating distributors do day in day out. Well, all right maybe there aren’t bananas back there on the shelves with the pipe nipples and copper fittings. But the produce analogy fits in well with the difficulty in supplying whatever material you need to keep you on your productive way.