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'Home Country'
Mega-stores offering more choices, but...
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By Slim Randles
[MAY
11, 2005]
A building project (for
those of us who are carpenterially challenged) can be a confusing
nightmare of little whatchits we never learned the name of and have
no idea how to use. |
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Oh, if we need a 2-by-4 that's 8 feet
long, we're on pretty safe ground and can head on over to MundoSlab,
the building center that dedicates about half an acre to just tar
paper. It's fun going over there just to see what the new foreign
doodads are for construction this month, and you never know when
you'll find something you can't live without. You can buy all the
stuff in there from either the kid who mowed your lawn up until a
month ago or from that nice girl your boy used to take to the
movies. But when the real
tough parts of a project come along -- you know, things that involve
plumbing or wiring -- there's only one place to go...
the surviving old-fashioned hardware store. MundoSlab coming in sure
cut down on the number of old-fashioned hardware stores, but there's
always one in every town that survives, and for a good reason.
They have gray-haired guys standing
just inside the door to help you find just what you need, even if
you don't know what it's called and have no clue how to install it,
or even if anyone's invented something to fix this particular
problem.
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column in this article]
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I walked in the hardware store the
other day, and a guy with plenty of gray came over and asked if he
could help.
"Well," I said. "I have a float
thingie on the horse trough that broke. It's that little doo-trammy
that's kinda copper-colored and fits on top of the whiz-gidget."
Without breaking stride, he looked
at me and said, "Right-hand threads, or will you need an adaptor?"
Let's see MundoSlab top that.
[Slim Randles]
Brought to you by "The Long Dark,"
an Alaska novel. See it at
www.slimrandles.com.
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