Why do customers ask me if I need help carrying toilets upstairs?

Unless it’s a real light bowl, I’ll oftentimes keep it in the box and bring it in strapped to the hand cart. Slower, but don’t want to tweak my back again.
The hand cart has what is essentially a rubber fan belt just above each of the wheels that contacts the stair treads and rolls on bearings. Helps to glide the load over each stair tread smoothly, rather than drag/scrape.

Used to install a lot of Gerber Viper and Avalanche toilets, and even in the elongated and ada compliant height that’s a pretty light weight bowl.
My wholesalers lost access to those toiletS in 1.6 gpf, so I eventually switched to American Standard Champion 4 in 1.6 gpf. Great toilet, but heavy.
Before leaving the Gerber name I did continue to install them for a while with aftermarket flush valves tuned to 1.6 gpf. But putting a $25 aftermarket flush valve into a brand new Avalanche gets expensive. Since Gerber wouldn’t give me what I want, American Standard seems like a natural progression.

 

I had a customer who was well into his 90's insist that he go down to the basement to turn off and on the water.. then wanted to carry stuff for me. Took FOREVER to get the water on and off and there was NO Way he was going to lift my tool box. So I let him turn the water on and off 3x that I was there and made sure to bring in my smaller tool bag so he could help with that.

I had a contract to replace all the toilets in a 25 floor building downtown.. probably 10/floor... took them up to the shoreline transfer station because they have a concrete floor to dump them onto.. but they were doing an inspection that day and asked me not to toss them! Was so unsatisfying. Later loads we took and had recycled rather than landfilled.