The Hardware Store

I’ve never been the type of guy who gets all goggle-eyed over equipment. Tractors, mowers, harvesters, etc., are just tools for use in getting a job done. But there is one such tool that is worth its weight in gold for the service it provides. The grapple attached to the front-end loader on my tractor relieves much of the burden of removing pruned or fallen limbs and trees from my orchard, saving my back considerable burden. Yet it is still a tool, and with so many moving parts it can run afoul from time to time.

Recently as I was removing limbs from the orchard and piling them up, one of the grapple’s hydraulic hoses gave way when an errant limb broke the coupling, and I had to go into town for another. Once in town, I took my hose inside the local hardware store. I didn’t go to Lowe’s, or Home Depot, or Tractor Supply. They wouldn’t have what I needed. I went to an honest-to-goodness, locally owned hardware store. I was promptly greeted by the cashier and by Tom, a gentle, old soul and one of several floor clerks assigned the task of locating a customer’s needed items among the plethora of goods sold in the store. Both the cashier and Tom greeted me by name. Tom asked how I was doing and how the pecan crop turned out last year. We exchanged pleasantries, and I told Tom I needed a new hydraulic hose coupling attached to my hose.

As I followed Tom to the hydraulics section of the store, I passed an old, framed photo propped in the store’s window and smiled. I have the same photo in a frame in my home. In it, two men stare at the camera surrounded by dry goods. There are shelves running the length of the walls on each side, glass display cabinets in front of the shelves, stacks of wooden storage crates on the floor, and a table between the two men on which a collection of oil lamps rests. Beneath the table there is a stack of handles for shovels, rakes, and hoes.

One of the men in the photo wears a snappy fedora on his head and a gold watch chain dangles from his belt loop. His arms are crossed in front of him, with the left hand grasping the right wrist. His feet are crossed casually as he leans on the table. This is my great-grandfather. The farm on which I was moving limbs when the hydraulic fitting broke was his farm at the time this photo was made. The other gentleman standing on the opposite side of the table, arms at his side, suspenders holding up his pants, is my great-grandfather’s brother. Both men are wearing white collared shirts with the sleeves rolled up. I imagine they were sweating.

The photo captures an earlier version of this same hardware store, albeit in another location a few blocks away, nearly one hundred years ago. Aside from being a frequent customer, I have nothing to do with the hardware store my great-grandfather started not long after the dawning of the twentieth century. It is run today by a second cousin of mine and, before him, by his father. Though I am attached to the store in name only, I still take great pride in the service this store has provided to this community all these years. Such stores that so perfectly cater to an individual community’s needs are rare in the twenty-first century.

Cordele is a small rural town in south-central Georgia, about an hour south of Macon and a little over two hours (thank goodness) south of Atlanta. It was founded as a railroad junction town in 1888, and the Norfolk Southern Rail line remains integral to daily life here. You are apt to be stopped multiple times per day by trains if you travel back and forth across town. Lake Blackshear is the area’s largest attraction, bringing campers and golfers to Veteran’s State Park and lakeshore homes to the water’s edge. Farming, especially watermelons, but also cotton and peanuts, as well as pecans and cattle, figures heavily in the local economy just as it has from the beginning. Much of Cordele’s downtown area has suffered the same indignities over the last 40 or 50 years as most small towns in America. The corporate big box retail stores built out closer to the interstate, along with the fast-food chains, while downtown slowly dried up.

I recall Roobin’s Department Store, where my mother took me as a kid for new shoes and back-to-school clothes, the downtown Barber Shop, Hatcher’s Feed and Seed, Hurt Motor Company, and the downtown banks, all within just a few blocks of each other. Even the Cordele Recreational Parlor, which dates back to 1939 and is known locally as “the pool room” where you could get a cheap hot dog for lunch, recently closed up shop. A few old businesses remain, like Adams Drug Store, Phillips Appliance, and Murray Printing Company. Wells Hardware can be counted on that short list of the town’s remaining old local businesses.

In the bygone days of the hardware store captured in the photograph, the store’s diversity of items ranged from porcelain wash bowls and pitchers to brooms with which one could sweep one’s house, or more likely in those days, one’s yard. Not many people in south Georgia could afford a lawnmower in the 1930s, so they swept the yard down to bare dirt every day to keep the weeds and the remaining critters that they attracted, such as rats and snakes. Cliff, from the big box headquarters in Des Moines, wouldn’t know anything about that.

At the time the photograph was taken, the store carried single trees and double trees (to which the mules were harnessed to pull farm equipment), baling twine, wood stoves, pipes, tools, planters, and mason jars. These were items the community needed to continue functioning, so the hardware store kept them in stock. It was a place the locals gathered on Saturday afternoon as the farm families came into town for their weekly visit. The hardware store was a valuable part of the community because it knew and served the community’s needs. They weren’t relying on the same homogenized inventory some guy in the marketing department four states away said they needed to stock. They sold what the community demanded. If they didn’t carry it, they would try to get it for you. And still do.

In an age of big box stores, and indeed, in spite of them, Wells Hardware has survived as a vital part of the life of Cordele. Wendell Berry once wrote that it takes three generations living in a place to really know that place. Wells Hardware is currently in its third generation within the same family, in the same community. It offers things that those corporate chain stores cannot, like customized service. It operates on the human scale and remains one of those places where people cross paths and ask about each other’s relatives. It is a place where relationships matter. You get a sense of the culture of the community just by spending some time there. The hardware store pulls all of this off because it still genuinely knows this place.

I have memories of this store that go back to the 1970s. I used to walk across the street from my father’s business with my grandfather after school and get lost in the sporting goods section while my grandfather visited with people he’d run into in the aisles of his brother’s store. My first baseball bat, a gold and black Reynolds aluminum bat, came from the hardware store. As did my first baseball glove, a Franklin. They were sitting there with the footballs, basketball goals, and golf clubs an aisle over from the toilets and faucet fixtures, shelves full of bolts, pipes, and just about anything one can imagine one might need. When I headed off to college, my grandfather took me into the hardware store to buy me a set of tools he felt every young man should have—screwdrivers, various wrenches, a hammer, a pair of pliers, a socket wrench set, and a pair of jumper cables.

The volume and diversity of useful items available for purchase in Wells Hardware today remains astounding. I will never understand how it can all neatly fit into this 12,000-square-foot building with a little overflow into the warehouse next door. Ask for a ¼” bolt, a 2” gate valve, a light bulb, a 1” crescent wrench, duct tape, or some electrical wire, and any one of the small platoon of clerks can take you directly to it. They will tear off a sheet of paper from a small pocket notepad with their particular number stamped on each page for you to hand to the lone cashier (an actual person, not some cache of self-checkout machines) so that she can credit the clerk who helped you.

I’m not sure what others buy in the hardware store, but the list of items I’ve acquired in my patronage of the place over the years is extensive. It includes hydraulic hoses, hitch pins, the inner workings of a toilet, mouse traps, flagging tape, PVC pipes and the glue to hold them together, a pair of muck boots for my oldest daughter, water hoses, brass gate valves, ductwork for a dryer, screws, nails, cordless drills, and countless pairs of work gloves. The hardware store has been my source for fencing, AA batteries, tractor batteries, lawnmower blades, hydraulic oil, sprocket gears, pumps, flashlights, chains, wheelbarrows, and shovels. Most importantly, it was the source of my ubiquitous and highly treasured Case pocketknife. As a bonus, I pick up a free calendar from the counter each Christmas.

This hardware store is, I believe, what E.F. Schumacher had in mind in his vision of localism when he suggested that men organized in small units will take better care of their community than “anonymous companies or megalomanic governments which pretend to themselves that the whole universe is their legitimate quarry.” In a time when we order much of what we purchase online with no face-to-face contact and have it delivered to our door by drone, when we grow increasingly frustrated with the AI voice on the telephone or the human we finally reach somewhere on the other side of the world in the corporations’ weak attempts at customer service, the locally owned hardware store offers a refreshing experience.

Berry too, in praise of local economy, provides what I see as an accurate description of Wells Hardware and all the little stores like it throughout the country, “So far as I can see, the idea of a local economy rests upon only two principles: neighborhood and subsistence. In a viable neighborhood, neighbors ask themselves what they can do or provide for one another, and they find answers that they and their place can afford. This, and nothing else, is the practice of neighborhood.” In my experience at least, this “practice of neighborhood” has been the mode of operation for the local hardware throughout my lifetime.

The thing I like most about the store is the fact that it caters to the entire local community and the community’s integrity. The hardware store’s customers aren’t just customers. They aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. They are its neighbors. From the lady who needs a step ladder to reach the top of the kitchen cabinet, to the older gentleman who needs a new garden hose and a new bird feeder, to the farmer who needs new cogs, bearings, and sprockets for his peanut combine, the hardware store supplies their needs. In doing so, it helps to support, protect, and preserve both the unique identity of the community and its own place in it.

The big box stores may offer some of the same products on their shelves as the local hardware. You can probably even conveniently order them online from the big stores, perhaps even cheaper. Both the big stores and the local hardware stores want to make a profit. The difference exists in how they go about it and what the effects of those two very different approaches are for the community. The big store is there, ultimately, because the corporation has run the analytics and discovered that this community has enough people to support the company’s profitability. They won’t change what they sell or how they serve the customer based on the needs of the community. They want the customer to have a positive experience so they will return to buy something else. But there is a limit to how far the company will go to do this. After all, there are formulas for how this must be done. It must all work out on paper, and within the company the customer can easily become just another number in that formula. If the community won’t fit its formula, the corporation may cut its losses, close this version of the store down, and move on to greener pastures. The hardware store on the other hand, along with its owners and employees, lives here and that is the difference.

This living in and with requires the local hardware to take into account what one of my favorite philosophers, Sheriff Andy Taylor, once described as “the human equation.” What the fictional good Sheriff of Mayberry was referring to is the need to consider the individual, the context of a situation, common sense, and local understanding over impersonal and bureaucratic corporate protocols when dealing with people and communities. Increasingly, that human equation is what we are all desperately searching for in a world that is quickly becoming more artificial, impersonal, cold, and unrecognizable to many. Communities are not meant to be fed into a spreadsheet with the desired result spit out the other end in cookie-cutter fashion. They are made up of people, and they must therefore operate on a human scale.

Once in the hardware store’s warehouse building where the hydraulic fittings and hoses are housed, Tom cut the old fitting off my hose as the acrid smell of burnt rubber filled the room. He attached the new fitting to the hose with the crimping machine in the corner, handed me the repaired hose, tore off a number-stamped page from his pocket notebook, and walked me back to the cashier with a smile on his face. After paying my bill, I glanced back at the photo of my great-grandfather as I left the store. Smiling with satisfaction at the service provided by the store and this small but treasured connection I share with the life of this little town, I climbed back into my pickup, drove to the farm, re-attached the hose, and continued the day’s work, just as all the other customers of the hardware store have done for decades in this little community still striving to hold onto itself.

Image Credit: Pietro Barucci