Main Character of the Week is a weekly column that tells you the most prominent “main character” online (good or bad). It runs on Fridays in the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter. If you want to get this column a day before we publish it, subscribe to web_crawlr, where you’ll get the daily scoop of internet culture delivered straight to your inbox.
The internet is a stage, and someone unwillingly stumbles onto it weekly. This makes them the “main character” online. Sometimes their story is shocking, like the Spirit Halloween worker who put out the new merch for fall and turned heads; usually it’s a gaffe. In any case, that main character energy flows through the news cycle and turbo-charges debate for several business days.
Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week.
It’s the Lumber Liquidators worker who told us that the flooring industry tricks us into buying a whole new floor every couple of years.
And in doing so, he gave us some of the most actionable life advice that the Daily Dot has ever published. When you’re at Home Depot buying that fake wood flooring that we all have in order to replace a post-dog carpet, buy an extra box or two.
According to the employee, those planks are re-configured every “2 to three years” to ensure that you have to buy a whole new floor whenever your nervous dog damages one of them. And they will no longer snap together like Legos.
The upstairs and the downstairs in my home have these popular planks. Sure enough, both sets of flooring have irreparable holes because replacements for these specific planks are no longer in stock.
It’s maddening to consider the insidious nature of this reveal. But it’s extremely obvious upon closer examination. Corporations run on proprietary technology. It was Jeff Bezos who said that he wanted to build “a moat around his customers” with Amazon Prime. He spent years developing it even when his shareholders questioned the logic.
Dealerships in the past decade have pushed to become the exclusive home of your regular oil changes. Automakers track your car when that new Camry leaves the lot. Often so that they can recalibrate said vehicle’s resale value and, ultimately, buy it back from you. In low-income American communities, McDonald’s points redeemable for a free medium fry are such valuable commodities that McDonald’s has been accused of crashing its own app when a user is in an actual McDonald’s.
So this alleged-but-come-on-totally-real anti-customer move by the flooring industry feels extremely personal.
The TikToker said that he was revealing this because Lumber Liquidators was going out of business. (Is it me or are Lumber Liquidators perpetually going out of business?) He also said that the only recurring customers he runs into are landlords who cheaply flip a house to make it appear like an Airbnb.
He said that laminate and vinyl flooring is the only thing that people can afford these days. That nobody buys tile. Or wood. That explains his employer’s conundrum.
The only customers buying your lowest-value product are either landlords or naïve millennials in their first home who love that Pinterest-friendly moonbeam flooring.
Explains the backstabbing trick.
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