On Monday of this week specialty coatings manufacturer and distributor of Pittsburgh Paints , Mercury Paint announced a price increase, one of a plethora since the beginning of the war with Iran.    In a letter to customers, Mercury refers to the ongoing conflict and the supply chain disruptions its causing, which if not for the situation in Rochester is all I would be writing about.  Because like the news from Rochester, inflation is not going away anytime soon.  Already th

A retraction becomes necessary when something a writer proffers as fact turns out to be untrue, a crow I have not eaten often as I tend to measure my words.  But while facts can’t change circumstances can, so despite all efforts I find I must now suffer the embarrassment of a retraction .      Last week I blogged that Sherwin-Williams was illegally operating their plant in Rochester, Pennsylvania, which is not the statement I need to retract .  Nor will I need to retract my

Once government and the lawyers arrive in Rochester, a map will show the vast spread of Sherwin’s plume across Western Pennsylvania. Now as much a part of that region’s topography as the Appalachian Mountains and Allegheny Plateau, the chemicals of Sherwin’s greed forever covering that earth.   The plume from years of PFAS venting may stretch as many as 50-miles from Sherwin’s stack, depending on airflow patterns and topography.  In the range Pittsburgh, Penn Hills, Youngstow

With an insidious disregard for both humanity and the law, Sherwin-Williams CEO Heidi Petz has exposed thousands of Pennsylvanians to the hazards of her process.  Leaking and venting a cocktail of waste ladened with the neurotoxin Methyl Methacrylate (MMA).  And other Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances or PFAS, also known as forever chemicals .    The effects of exposure to MMA are instant: a sensitizer which changes your immunological profile immediately after induction. 

One of the chemicals Sherwin-Williams is venting on the people of Rochester—or perhaps leaking —is Methyl Methacrylate or MMA, a liquid, which wants to be a gas as badly as I want to see Heidi Petz held responsible for the venal avarice of her personage.   Monty , that means I think she’s an asshole too.   At room temperature MMA contains a vapor pressure of 40 millimeters of Mercury (mmHg), so that evaporation happens even at that temperature.  Twice as fast as water and t

On January 30, 2026, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection issued Sherwin-Williams a series of violations for illegal operations at their Rochester plant. Since learning that I've uncovered even more truths about that plant, which I intend to share with you each day this week.   A deposit on the years it will require to make a full accounting of what in the end, will be paint’s largest environmental disaster sans lead.  A criminal act perpetrated by inten

In 1893 Sherwin-Williams advertising manager George Ford first sketched the Cover the Earth logo, a prophecy of Sherwin-Williams paint—vomited on us all.        The spill was intended to symbolize abundance and dominance according to Ford , insisting Sherwin wasn’t just selling paint but rather submerging the world in it.  Showing the prescience of Nostradamus, their discharge now covers the earth.   Like the time EPA inspected Sherwin’s Stage Coach Trail manufacturing facil

THE chicken and egg are the most acclaimed of the causality dilemmas, a paradox philosophers have been tempted with since they sighted the first chicken.  Or egg. And though science has finally settling that score , I still spent the week in the grips of that classic paradox. Unsure where it all began.   Eight days ago, I received a tip I felt compelled to peruse—making that impulse seem the cause of my week spent obsessing.  Until I mention that I was only compelled to fo

Proving that dreams really do come true, I was hired last week as an expert witness in a paint dispute.  Paid by the hour to impart paint knowledge, including what every dealer and store manager reading this screed already knows: painters do some dumbass shit .   To prepare for deposition I inspected the job gone bad, finding application errors which caused a six-figure failure.  One which, like most complaints I inspected during my 30-year career, could have been avoided if

In a complaint filed in Superior Court in California’s San Joaquin County, a former Sherwin-Williams employee alleges that the company “rounded down” his time each time he clocked out.    “As a matter of established company policy and procedure ."   That employee’s accusations mirror those in other cases , and those made directly to me by the hundreds of Sherwin-Williams employees I spoke with as I investigated wage theft at that firm. Among the accusations is that Sherwin en

At their national sales meeting in Orlando last month , Sherwin-Williams CEO Heidi Petz instructed hourly employees attending the event not to clock in before breakfast. Further, she required they clock out after each session and back in when they start the next. each day walking the show for eight to ten hours.    But Heidi only had to pay them for six.   The practice left managers short the requisite hours to fulfill their weekly obligation to Sherwin, forcing them back

Earlier this week I posted the pilot episode of a new podcast series called Mark Lipton Live , where I summarized the findings of my investigation of wage theft at Sherwin-Williams .    Recorded earlier this month, the episode lays out my case against Sherwin, which forces employees to work without pay as a matter of practice according to the hundreds of Sherwin-Williams employees I interviewed.  In the episode I speak to how each class of employee is impacted by these schem

In July of 2022 I pondered whether slowing sales in Sherwin’s Consumer Brands Group portended a shift in DIY shopping habits , as early data suggested.  Four years later that trend is easily seen, and not just in the results at Sherwin’s CBG but also in the results at Masco. Which, like Sherwin, is struggling to maintain its market share in the DIY segment.   Last week Masco reported a 15% decrease in their volume through Home Depot during the fourth quarter of 2025, a stagge

On Monday I reported that Pittsburgh Paints had removed their eponymously branded products from the shelves at Home Depot, unwinding the first of Irick’s Follies .  The second being he belief that Walmart could sell paint .   When the agreement to put PPG’s best-selling store and dealer brands into Home Depot was announced in 2022, I opined the idea seemed fraught: unlikely to generate growth in excess of the cannibalism which seemed assured. And the move was certain to lo

After all that , former Sherwin-Williams executive Monty Griffin had some advice for me, like a bug on the windshield telling the driver to change lanes. Still  unable to hold his thumbs, allowing me to call his basic comprehension  into question.     In an email sent in reply to my post, Griffin suggested I seek legal counsel prior to mentioning his name again, perhaps thinking there was some law protecting assholes from being called out?  His threat begs further rebuke,

I was befuddled when former Sherwin-Williams executive Monty Griffin showed up hot in my LinkedIn threads more than a month ago asserting that, “everything about me was offensive” in a reply to one post.    Had he only said most things, I might have plead guilty.    Despite that introduction and our vastly different perspectives, I invited Monty to keep replying to my posts, asking only that he keep those replies on topic rather than ad hominem. The first of several times I

Last week I reported that more than 400 paint geeks had lost their jobs in layoffs at Pittsburgh, Rust-Oleum (owned by RPM), Ace Hardware and Chemours, the country’s leading TiO2 producer.  Those 400 are among an estimated 1,000 laid off in paint in the last three-quarters, though a detailed accounting might make that number closer to 1,200.   I further shared my belief that more layoffs were still to come, a forecast which became fact the next day when Carboline let anot

Last week was a bad one for paint geeks who were forced to watch their ranks diminish by nearly 400 after layoffs at Pittsburgh, Rust-Oleum, Ace Hardware and Chemours—a leading producer of TiO2.  That bloodbath leaving Dan Calkins’ opportunism as the week’s only good news.    Which was only good for independent paint retailers .   Combined with layoffs at Pittsburgh , Behr , Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore during the second half of last year and more than 1,000 of us

The economy of the United States was still recovering from the Great Depression in 1936, with unemployment down to 15% from its high of 25% in 1933.  With Gross Domestic Product also on the rise, things were probably looking up for the first time since 1929 in my grandfather’s Bronx, New York, paint store.    In an era before DIY projects and ready-made paints, customers in Gramps’ store were all painters, buying lead, solvent, pigments and driers in bulk before blending the

British rock star Chrissie Hynde is best known for her dark contralto , a captivating tone which maintains its haunt even as the octaves rise.    Lead singer and guitarist for the band the Pretenders , Hynde played the University of Maryland’s Ritchie Coliseum in 1981 where I was a freshman working concert security. Just a short walk from my room in the fraternity house , the gig ensured a front row seat for the best campus events, while putting enough cash in my pocket t