Closing In Town

The hardware store that’s like two towns over is closing. This is a serious blow to our hardware-shopping needs. It’s a pretty good hardware store. By “pretty good” I mean I can imagine my father hanging out there talking for upwards of 150 minutes with people he just met about some obscure plumbing part that he needs while eight-year-old me sighs and presses his finger into the socket set attachments and wonders when we’re going to get to the Polish bakery and if so whether it’ll be before they run out of Poppy-Seed Thingies. I’m going to go ahead and assume the obscure plumbing part is a “flange”. Like all plumbing parts that aren’t toilet seats it’s a circular disc attached to a Y-shaped hinge on an axis, and mounted inside a cylinder.

Also whenever you select, like, the four washers and nuts-and-bolts that turn out not to quite fit the project you have, they put it in a cute tiny little brown paper bag and scribble on it some mystic scrawl, using one of those flat carpenter’s pencils that has to be sharpened by pocket knife, that somehow the cashier knows to ring up as $1.42 total. Or maybe a wax pencil. I’m not being too limiting in my categories here. The important thing is it’s a bundle of little metal shapes in a cute brown paper bag folded over and maybe stapled shut and it’s always $1.42.

But it’s also not too much a hardware store. By “too much” I mean “every aisle is occupied by grumpy men with scraggly beards complaining about how they can’t make good plumbing flanges anymore because of political correctness”. What they mean by “political correctness” is the flanges are made of PVC instead of the most rust-worthy iron in the history of rusting.

This is also a serious blow for the town. I mean, the town will still exist, but mostly as residential developments and medical clinics in strip malls. In terms of stuff people actually need there’s going to be little left except the Best Buy. The hardware store’s corner used to have a tolerable little crossroads’ worth of stuff. Like, there was a music-instruments store that got shooed off across the street so the fire department could use their old building for training. They lasted a couple months there before moving to climes where people weren’t visiting to ask about the check they weren’t supposed to deposit for another couple weeks.

Also at the intersection used to be the Travelers Club International Restaurant and Tuba Museum, which billed itself as the only Tuba Museum Restaurant in the world, and I think was owned by the same people as the music-instruments store. At least it would make less not-sense if it were. It was a great spot to bring friends from out of town, because they had a lot of tubas, some of them extremely long, all along the walls. Also the menu was twenty pages even before you count the pages that were just the staff’s poetry. They closed right before the music-instruments shop vanished, possibly because both were turned directly into quirky indie dramas about, like, a slacker time-traveller from the 23rd century going back to work a small town diner and finding that kind of loving relationship where you never actually touch or necessarily even look directly at each other.

For the hardware store’s closing (remember that?) they’re holding a clearance sale, which is fair enough. It’d be sad to have a shuttered hardware store in town. But to have a shuttered hardware store filled with hardware-store merchandise would just be too creepy-video-game of them. Even if plastic clothes hangers are in the hardware store for some reason. I guess they’re kind of hardware but, yeah? I don’t know. I really expected them to be metal. Possibly galvanized.

They’re also raffling off hardware. According to their rules sheet, which is copyright 1999 to somebody named “Wingate Sales Solutions”, everyone who signs up gets 100,000 raffle points. And there’s a thousand more points for every dollar you spend during the clearance sale. And even more bonus points for stuff like `Sweetheart Thursday’, a thousand points times your ring size. Or 5,000 points on Mondays for “wearing something blue”, a condition I do not want to judge because telling Navy Blue apart from Black is hard in the best of circumstances. In Mid-Michigan, in November, at the height of Clouds Rolling In season? (We won’t have direct sunlight again until June of 2019.) It’s almost impossible.

Also, a hundred thousand raffle points just for signing up? A thousand points for every dollar spent? A thousand points times whatever just for having a ring finger? But I guess the shop is closing. They must figure they aren’t going to suffer the long-term consequences of a loose-money raffle-points system. It always opens doors when you don’t have to worry about the budget anymore.