The True Value of Local Hardware Stores

This morning on my way to work a True Value hardware semi-trailer truck pulled in front of me in traffic. The back door of the truck had pictures of the top of paint cans under words that read, "Follow Me To Your Favorite Paint Color."

Nice ad, I thought. Only there isn't a True Value store within miles of our house any more. There used to be four of them within 10 minutes of where we live. The big box hardware stores either drove them out of business or the simple odds of local retailing meant the change came along naturally .

The True Value in our home town was one of the anchor stores in our downtown for quite a few years. Since the True Value closed, there have been four or five different stores occupying the space. Now it's a bike shop, which is a good thing. But for a long time our downtown suffered from a loss in shopping traffic due in part to the loss of the hardware store, a cog in the local wheel. Other downtown stores benefited from the traffic.

Hardware is all about price and selection these days. Locally based hardware stores were more about location and convenience. Smaller hardware stores have trouble buying products at prices that make them competitive on the store shelves.

Before the local True Value went out of business there were actually two hardware stores in our downtown. The competition for local dollars in the first "mini-recession" of the late 1980s killed off the Coast to Coast store as well. I do remember going from one store to the other trying to find parts for a project on which i was working. Finally I went out to the Ace on the edge of town and got lucky. Of course the reality is that no single hardware store has everything. The dirty little secret of hardware retailing is that store employees will often quietly tell you where to find something their store does not carry. How they know this information I do not know. Rather than send me away as a customer, their kindnesses have always brought me back to the original store.

The local Ace Hardware is exactly 1.4 miles away, not much farther from my house than the old True Value. The Ace however is located in a high traffic location near an intersection that makes it difficult to execute a left turn back onto the street that takes me home. That means I have to make a right turn onto a half-mile of congested highway before turning toward home again. The extra time on the road can be stressful you're in a genuine hurry thanks to an iffy patch you put on a pipe at home. I really do prefer not to leave my wife at the mercy of my plumbing or carpentry mistakes. There have been enough near calamities to justify these fears. She gives me the evil eye whenever I tell I'm running to the hardware store in the middle of a job. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?" she'll call out as I'm headed out the door. "Should i expect any surprises while you're gone?"

I'm never completely, absolutely, positively, confidently sure what I'm doing around the house. Even projects I've done before can take an evil turn without warning. My wife knows these things. That is the main reason I like having a hardware store that is very close to home with a helpful hardware man or woman waiting to answer my urgent, sometimes desperate questions.

On any given day, most hardware stores are filled with earnest people trying to find solutions to the major headache waiting back home. Hardware stores are like vending machines for the terminally incapable, but they also serve people who happen to know what they're doing around the house. All told, hardware stores perform the vital economic service of getting people out of their happy homes, where they'll be tempted to stop at other stores. If you're trying to revitalize an aging downtown, you might want to consider recruiting a hardware store. You just might want to make sure it has a coffee bar, or better yet, a plain old bar. When fix-it-yourself projects don't go that well at home, it might be nice to have someplace to drown our sorrows.