Recession Advice For Hardware Stores

The small-town  hardware store serves a integral part to the well-being of a neighborhood.  The stores once sat on Main Street, but are now a welcome feature in strip malls serving cul-de-sac neighborhoods across our country.

When children stick their fingers through the screen on the screen door, it is the small hardware store that does these minor repairs. A short on the electrical wiring in the lamp, the broken mirrors and broken outlet switch plate are all easily repaired in the back room of the small independent hardware store.

Dick Thomes stands ready to help, from the Star Tribune,
Dick Youngblood: Selling hardware the old-fashioned way works.

The broken items are unhinged, unplugged and carried to the back of the store where the hardware store guys peep their heads out through the circular opening in the back, and say, “What can I help you with?”  The repair is usually complete in three or four days. The price for these jobs is scribbled on the brown paper used to protect the work for transport, and  hovers around the single digits; sometimes even cents. The hardware store give the structures of our homes soul, a history, by letting us keep them around with a squirt of oil here, a tightening here, and a fresh coat of paint on top of the surface we’ve sanded.

While I’m sure the big box hardware stores might have men like these, walking through the big store with its brand new screen doors, entire lighting departments, and decorator mirrors, the message becomes clear. “Throw that old stuff out! Buy New!”  The men in the aisle are there to direct you to aisle numbers where new stuff is sold; rather than the repair aisle.  The big warehouses have their places; where else can you walk out with an entire door or a chandelier, when you really need one?

The closing of a hardware store in any neighborhood is a sign that things are going downhill.  Screen doors will swing loosely hinged when it’s not so convenient to run out a get a bag of two-penny nails.  The vacuum cleaner with the short in the cord will be replaced with a new one; at the end of the month.  Spare keys are not as easily to get without a big trip out to the shopping centers.

Here’s my advice to the small town hardware stores: Reach out to the kids.  Offer help for science fair projects; give them ideas for summer lazy days — like how to power a radio with lemons.  Show them how the wires costs mere pennies, and once you know how to connect them, you can create magic.  Line up a row of each hardware store guy’s science fair projects from years gone by, with the accompanying models and message boards, to inspire kids who still can’t figure out “what to do.” (The parents will be eternally grateful.)  Show them that hardware, truly linked to science, can be fun too. Teach us, maybe for the first time, that light bulb filament can be made out of picture frame wire; and that filament was once horse hair wire.

In the spring, plant a few of the green beans and peas from the seed display, right at the front door, and tie them up with twine on bamboo, and get their kids to beg their parents to buy some seeds so they can have a fort too. Teach us how easy it is to grow beans — even magic ones. Grow some sunflowers on the other side of the front door, and sell the edible seeds to the kids in the fall; brown paper bags with $0.15 scribbled in pencil on the side.

Show us again, how canning all that surplus from our gardens, can be done without blowing the roof off the house. My Mom always bought the rubber gasket for her pressure cooker at our hardware store.

For the kids not interested in gadgets, forts or snacks, show how a simple chair can be transformed into the latest PB Teen Style with a simple can of spray paint. Or a display board crafted from cork tiles, more spray paint, and grommets.

The small town hardware store holds the keys to the life of the neighorhood.

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