I love hardware stores and by that I don’t mean Home Depot, Lowe’s, Menards or Tractor Supply, all great stores, one and all. But we live 30 minutes away from the nearest Home Depot, which means it’s a one hour trip to buy one carriage bolt or a bar of Lava Soap. (Can you believe our local grocery store doesn’t sell Lava? They must figure no one works hard enough to get their hands dirty any more. And they may be right!)
When I say hardware store I’m talking about the ones that serve small rural communities. In many respects ours is very much like the general store of yesteryear where you can buy pet food, rhododendrons, Carhartt hoodies, soda pop, 5 hour energy drinks, candy bars and deck screws all in one place. Ours even has an all new frozen food section for recently divorced men who want to buy their dinner in the same store they buy their chainsaws.
Our local hardware store is bulging at the seams so every morning they move out plants, barbecue pits, patio furniture and even dinosaurs for the garden, so the sidewalk out front looks like a Tijuana swap meet! Our local hardware store doesn’t sell beer and wine yet but they do give away free popcorn on the weekend which draws customers like donuts do cops. There’s just something about the smell of popcorn drenched in butter that makes you want to buy a $300 leaf blower.
Over the years I’ve collected my own hardware store of sorts with a giant collection of nuts, bolts, hinges, washers, refrigerator lightbulbs, bearings, padlocks, bug spray, metric sockets, O rings, and WD 40. (You can never have enough WD 40!) I’m so well stocked that on rare occasions when the hardware store doesn’t have something they send the customer to my house.
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