Air nailers versus hammers… lessons from history

When I began building in the mid-1980s in rural Ontario, every professional roofer used a hammer and nails. No one fastened shingles with air nailers until the mid-1990s, and even then just a few bought into the newfangled technology. I even remember diehard roofers in the 2000s explain to me why they figured they could finish a roof faster with a nail pouch. Yah, right. The ability of people to fool themselves has no limit, but there’s a lesson here.

Once upon a time the cost of roofing in a given area was based on the assumption that every roofer used a hammer and nails. The early adopters of shingle nailers enjoyed windfall profits because their efficiency was so much higher than the community of hammer roofers whose bids set the market price in their area. As more and more roofers adopted pneumatics they could make money at lower bids. Competition did what it always does. It drove prices down to the point where we are today. No professional roofer can support themselves and a family these days driving nails by hand. The windfall profits generated by early shingle nailers are gone and this technology is now mandatory for being in the roofing business. Consumers benefit financially from lower roofing costs and the elbows of roof contractors last longer, but air nailers no longer boost profitability beyond the norm because they are the norm.

The lesson here is simple. Every revolutionary, efficiency-boosting commercial technology has a life cycle that goes from big profit boost to no profit boost. It’s the quest for windfall profits that drives people to adopt new technologies in the first place. The length of this life cycle depends on how fast the majority of people adopt the new technology and this varies depending on where you work. I’m told that roofers in Alberta started using air nailers nearly 20 years before roofers in my little backwater did.

The days of revolutionary changes in tools that can double worker productivity in a given area are either gone forever or hardly ever happen. There are no more hammers to replace with air nailers, but this doesn’t mean there are no more windfall technologies. These days windfall profits are more likely to come through the kind of information technology that connects good contractors with clients who appreciate quality and are willing to pay for it. How long will the windfall profits from videos, photos, and online testimonials on a website last? If I know anything about the contracting business, probably until this generation of contractors has retired and been replaced. After that, a .com presence, video testimonials about your work and instant online accessibility to clients will be as ordinary a part of the contracting business as your truck.