Family Store Closing

I went to the hardware store today. Upon arriving there I noticed a sign in the window. “All merchandise 30% off and everything must go.” After 81 years being operated by the same family the doors are being closed permanently. This is a crisis for me as I hate shopping at Home Despot or Lowes. When I need something from the hardware store it’s usually something very specific. When one shops at Home Despot one encounters poorly disguised clerks who failed checker school at K-Mart and ended up working at the Home Despot.

Almost everytime I have needed something at Home Despot the clerk had no idea what it was I was looking for. One can’t go into Home Despot and by a HZ71C-04 Muffler Bering. The kids working there have never taken anything apart and fixed it. They just buy an entirely new Muffalater and replace the existing one. Since they don’t know things can actually be fixed they try to sell you a new Muffalater instead of just selling you the part to fix it.

Another thing Home Despot does is package everything like a Sams Club or Costco. When I need a wifflier joint for a swizzle swanson I don’t need a hundred of them. I want to buy just one please. The local hardware store was a treasure trove of just such transactions. Not only could I walk in and explain what part I needed I could usually buy just that ONE part. If they didn’t have it they would frequently order just that part for me.

One might think that the prices at the Family Owned Store would have been higher than Home Despot but that was almost never the case. Usually the prices were less at the Family Store.

When I was building my grape arbor I needed 2 inch piping for part of the support structure. At Home Despot they could cut the pipe to length but had no way to thread the new end. At the Family Store they not only cut it to length they threaded the new ends at no charge.

What this reminds me of is the computer industry. We have an entire generation of people who think that computers can’t be fixed. Something breaks and you replace the components instead of fix it. When CD ROMS first came out they were very expensive. The first one I had in my computer broke not long after the warranty expired. What did I do? I took it apart and fixed it myself. I had to do this three times before the prices came down enough to buy a new one.

Now that my favorite store is closing I have no idea where I will be able to go to buy the items I need to fix things. I realize in our disposable society its often times cheaper to buy a new one rather than fix the old one but if the old one can be fixed by replacing a 1.99$ part why buy a new one?

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