We pulled five years of a public countertop community, 10,132 posts and 152,505 comments, and analysed it ourselves. Nobody in this trade publishes this. Here is what it says, and here is exactly what it cannot tell you.
Every one shows its numbers, the pattern that produced them and the limits that apply. Finding 01 has its own page. Findings 02 and 03 are reported in full further down this one.
1,430 of 9,197 question posts name an installer, fabricator or contractor, drawing 24,534 comments. No other subject in the category comes close, and most of those posts are a photo asking strangers for a verdict.
We expected the community to talk about legal recourse more than about seeing your slab before it is cut. It does not: prevention advice appears about 3.3 times as often. The test, the numbers and the bug we found in our first pass are below.
Quartzite is the fastest-moving material in the dataset, rising in every single year from 2021 to 2026 while quartz drifted the other way. What that does and does not imply for a Calgary kitchen is below.
The hypothesis we set out to confirm was that homeowners talk about suing a fabricator more than they talk about approving a slab before it is cut. The corpus says the opposite, by a wide margin, so the finding is the correction.
Every count above is a case-insensitive regular expression run over the 152,505 usable comment bodies, restricted to comments that also carry an advice cue such as "you should", "make sure", "always", "never" or "my advice".
Our first prevention pattern was not anchored to the words around it, so it matched 1,470 comments, roughly 3 times the corrected figure. It was catching any comment that used a word like "select" or "approve" anywhere near the word "slab", including people describing what a fabricator had already done to them. Anchoring the verb to the noun, and requiring the before-cutting sense, brought it down to 453.
We over-corrected once on the way, to 109, by demanding the phrase name the slab explicitly and drop layout and seam approval. Both wrong numbers are printed here rather than deleted, because a research page that only ever shows the version that survived is not showing you its work.
It does not mean most homeowners get this right. Both figures are small against 152,505 comments, and the great majority of comments give no advice at all. It means that when advice is given, prevention is the more common thing said. It is also not a Calgary measurement: see the limits at the foot of this page.
The practical version of this finding is written up for buyers, with the questions to ask any fabricator, in how to choose a countertop company.
Share of each year's question posts that mention quartzite, 2021 to 2026. It is the only material in the dataset that rises in every year without exception.
Pattern: \bquartzite\b, matched against the title and body of each question post.
Reading only the years worth reading, 2023 onward, quartz went from 25.9% to 22.8% while quartzite went from 9.6% to 17.6%. Quartz's 31.6% in 2021 is off 57 posts in a part year and is not worth reading as a starting point.
Quartz is still by far the bigger subject in absolute terms, so this is a change in relative attention, not quartzite overtaking anything. The category also grew enormously over the same window, 97 posts in 2021 against 2,628 in 2026, and a rising percentage of a much larger number is a great many more posts about quartzite.
| Year | Quartzite posts | Question posts that year | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2 | 57 | 3.5% |
| 2022 | 10 | 166 | 6% |
| 2023 | 49 | 509 | 9.6% |
| 2024 | 231 | 1,794 | 12.9% |
| 2025 | 645 | 4,302 | 15% |
| 2026 | 418 | 2,369 | 17.6% |
It is a measure of attention, not of sales, and not of Calgary. The honest reading is that quartzite is the material buyers are increasingly curious about, which is worth knowing when you are choosing, and worth nothing at all as a prediction of what your neighbours are installing. 2021 is a part year and its percentages move on a handful of posts, so read the trend from about 2023 onward.
What quartzite actually is, how it differs from quartz and marble, and what it costs to fabricate are covered on the quartzite countertops page and in quartz vs granite vs quartzite.
Share of the 9,197 question posts that mention each subject. A post can mention several, so these do not add to 100%.
All 15 subject clusters, with the comment volume behind each, are on the installer trust page.
What we collected. Every public post in r/CounterTops, a public Reddit community for countertop buyers, installers and fabricators between 2021-07-01 and 2026-07-18, plus their comment threads. That is 10,132 posts and 153,704 comments, of which 152,505 still had a body to read. We used the Arctic Shift full-history archive (Reddit's own listing endpoints cap at about 1,000 posts, so the archive is the only way to see five years).
How posts were classified. A post counts as a question post if it has a written body, or its title contains one of 25 asking cues (?, help, advice, should i, is this, how much, ...). That gives 9,197 question posts, 90.8% of the total. Subject clusters are word-boundary matched phrase patterns run over the title and body together. Every pattern used is printed on the page that reports its number, so you can disagree with one specifically rather than in general.
What we did not do. We did not read every post. We did not survey anybody. We did not sample: this is the whole archive for that window, so there is no sampling error to quote, only classification error, which is real and which the patterns let you judge.
Where the analysis is ours. The counts are mechanical. The reading of them is ours, and it is opinion. Where our first reading turned out to be wrong we have said so on the page rather than quietly changing the number, which is the whole reason finding 02 is written the way it is.
The community was small in 2021 and large by 2026. Early percentages move on a handful of posts, so a year-over-year trend line is only worth reading from about 2023 onward.
Published in full, because research that only lists its strengths is marketing.
Reddit does not publish where a poster lives, so we counted the places they mention. This is a lower bound on how American the corpus is, not a census, because most posts never name a location at all.
| Signal | Posts | Share of posts | Comments | Share of comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A US state or major US city is named | 255 | 2.52% | 1,785 | 1.17% |
| Any Canadian signal at all | 74 | 0.73% | 382 | 0.25% |
| Calgary or Alberta is named | 1 | 0.01% | 2 | 0% |
| A US big-box retailer is named | 133 | 1.31% | 1,023 | 0.67% |
This is the reason no number from this dataset is presented as a Calgary figure, and the reason no price from it is published anywhere on this site. Calgary pricing lives on the Calgary countertop pricing guide, sourced separately.
So we quote in writing, measure for free, and you see your slab. Talk to us about your kitchen.
Dataset built 2026-07-18. Analysis by Bedrock Countertops, Calgary. Regenerate the figures on this page with tools/research/build_research_json.py.