Hardware Mega-barns Just Don't Feel Right
Newcastle Herald
Friday March 7, 2003
SOME people like shopping for hardware in those new, gigantic mega-barns.
I don't.
It's too much like going to a supermarket. There's numbered aisles, piped music and the smell of food wafting from the cafe out the front.
Hardware stores aren't supposed to be like that.
They should smell like paint and turps and kero and timber and cement and rat-bait.
It was better in the old days.
Back then you went into your local hardware store and the bloke in the bib and brace overalls attentively listened to your problem.
``Ma-ate" you said to him, before explaining how you thought you were going to build your deck or fix your window or paint your weatherboards or whatever it was you were going to do.
He would think for a moment before pointing out the alternative ways you might do the job and suggesting what tools and bits and pieces you might need to buy.
Whether you took his advice or not, he knew exactly where in his store to find whatever it was you decided to buy and he would usually give you a couple of pointers on using it before you left.
The big mega-barns have ruined everything.
True, they have incredibly cheap battery drills and orbital sanders from China that last three months if you're lucky.
True too, they have a huge variety of things for sale on the myriad shelves of their numerous aisles.
But have you noticed how, little by little, the prices of all the small things you need to buy seem to have worked their way upward?
Nails, hinges, coach-screws, maple cover-strips and quads, cabin hooks, brackets: just buy a handful of bits and pieces and see how much change you get out of $100.
But I think the thing I miss most is the helpful bloke in the bib and brace overall.
Nowadays you are on your own. Or if you're lucky, you might get advice from a fellow shopper.
So many times I overhear a couple agonising over which bit of hardware to buy for which job. Sometimes another shopper will politely offer his two bob's worth: ``If you want my advice don't use those on a plasterboard wall. These ones are a lot better. You just put them on like this and then . . ."
The other day I was looking for some simple little piece of hardware but I just couldn't find it. It was like when you can't find the brown sugar in the supermarket and you walk around the aisles like the Flying Dutchman, passing the same faces and the same trolleys until you give up and go home without it.
I saw a bloke who worked in the store and, despite his best efforts to avoid me, I pinned him down and asked him where to find what I wanted. He said he didn't know but he made a call on the store's PA system and told me somebody would meet me shortly in aisle 20.
They did too: all the other poor lost shoppers who couldn't find what they were looking for met me there, hoping to hijack any store staff brave enough to show their face. They needn't have bothered. Nobody turned up.
The next staff-member I asked sent me to the tool department, where they laughed at me and sent me back into a holding pattern somewhere near the shelfware aisle.
Eventually another shopper and I cornered a kid who worked in the store and forced him to help us. The other shopper was pretty cranky (he wanted some flyscreen cut) and he gave the kid a fairly serious earful.
``Don't blame me mister," the kid said. ``I'm only a casual and they keep cutting my hours."
I feel like suing the directors of the big companies that own these stores for taking away one of my life's great pleasures. I used to love hardware stores as much as I love bookstores. You'd go in, you'd browse, you'd spend a few bucks and learn a few things.
Nowadays what you get is hide-and-seek games with the shy, harassed part-time staff, and queues and bar-code errors when you get to the checkouts.
© 2003 Newcastle Herald
