And oftentimes, I would call — I would once a week, maybe twice a week call somebody up, kind of throws them a little off kilter when they get a call from me right after they’ve put something, but you learn a lot that way. It’s largely almost too quick to see, but my predecessor had a phrase he used, sometimes he used to keep it on his computer screen. So if you want to grow your business, make it easy to buy. And sometimes, if you confuse the market, it’s kind of like in today’s world, you’ve got to eat. It’s a rare time that I go out to eat that I don’t check on my phone to see if the place is even open. Mondays and Tuesdays, especially you can’t necessarily count on it, especially in a town of 25,000 people. Economics don’t work for that business to be open certain nights.
And so the biggest thing we needed to do is be really, really consistent with what we’re doing. And the market reacts to that by saying, okay, this makes sense. And but if you get there and the door is closed, and you were expecting it to be opened. So I don’t have a lot of insight for you, Dave, other than to say, there’s probably a fewer comments about, I stopped there at 8 in the morning or 10 in the morning and your door was closed what’s going on. And on the flip side, it’s also empathy is a two-way street. And it’s really looking at it and saying, it’s finding that spot where the business can meet the roads, the wheel can meet the roads or rubber meets the road, whatever that expression is, but it’s good for both parties. And good is that we can provide a high level of service and it’s economically good business for, again, both parties.
I believe we can find it. A lot of that business is — has migrated, and we’ve seen it in our own internal statistics really since COVID started the amount of that business that’s migrated to the Internet. And it’s really — in some ways, the market making that transition of, boy, it’s a lot easier if I pop an order online and then go pick it up. It’s easier for the customer and so I think that’s part of it. And it’s also reminding our teams locally that our goal in everything we do is always trying to figure out how to make the market opportunity bigger and find good productive use of our time to serve the marketplace and serve our customer. I like it from the standpoint, I think it’s a better message for our team, go and grow the dam business and don’t — and stop spending time about what you’re not going to do.
Holden Lewis: And just probably the one piece of perspective I might add, Dave is, for a long time or for several years, we had a lot of different models occurring within the branch, right? There were some branches that did, in fact, close their doors. There were some branches that had very specific low call average. There are some branches that stayed open. There are branches that flipped their counters — branches that didn’t. And I think what you’re really seeing and picking up on is after several years of experimentation, which is really what Fastenal does. It came time to say, let’s settle on and align around kind of an agreed approach to it. And so what you picked up is essentially us having looked at the various experimentations that were run throughout the organization for a number of years and say, “hey, here’s the path forward that we’re going to take.
David Manthey: I appreciate the color, guys. Thank you.
Holden Lewis: Yeah.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question is coming from Jacob Levinson from Melius Research. Your line is now live.
Jacob Levinson: Good morning, Dan, Holden.
Holden Lewis: Good morning.
Jacob Levinson: I know you guys saw into lots and lots of different end markets. And maybe it’s not always easy to tell exactly where the product is going at the end of the day. But maybe you can just walk us through what you’re hearing from the field in terms of some of the positive and negative outliers on a vertical basis?
Holden Lewis: Yeah. Unfortunately, we don’t have great granular insight market by market. The example I often give is, there’s a lot of manufacturers out there that are considered manufacturers in our business, but they might have enormous oil and gas exposure, but we don’t see that oil and gas exposure. So I wish I could give you more detail end market by end market. We just don’t have it. The data doesn’t break out that way. The feedback from the field continues to be fairly uniform. I think aerospace is doing fairly well. I’m not getting a lot of feedback that anything else is really inflecting more favorably. I’m getting the feedback that everything else remains fairly tepid. And that generally speaking, managers across our business are fairly cautious on where the market is today. But I wish we could give you more granularity end market by end market. We just don’t have the means to measure it that way.
Dan Florness: The only thing I’ll add to it in my ask of everybody hearing this, don’t read too much into it because it’s a relatively small piece of our business. But when I’m going through the numbers, the individual that poses the stuff together, I often wear him out a little bit with questions and just to understand it myself. And the other end markets, which is about 11% of our business, it’s a bunch of stuff in there since the term other and it peaked up. And in one of the components of that is our business and our government business has been gaining strength as we’ve gone through the year, but it didn’t gain strength sequentially in September. And sometimes that’s just a function of comp. But generally speaking, it’s been gaining because we’ve been really successful in Onsite and government locations that we have in the business.
And so I asked him, I said, I know government didn’t tick up. Why did that tick up? And a big chunk of that other is transportation. And it’s not automotive transportation that’s not in there. It’s transportation that we sell into and that saw a real uptick. I’m not sure what that means. So maybe I created more questions with that answer than an answer with that answer. But that was the one thing that jumped out at me. I was — I’m still scratching my head on it, but at least I know that’s what drove the other end markets to grow 12.5%.
