My wife wears the toolbelt in our household, so she is the one who enjoys spending time in one of the places I most dread: the hardware store.
Her favorite? Without a doubt, it’s Seven Corners Hardware in downtown St. Paul, even though the big-box emporiums like Lowe’s, Menards and Home Depot are bigger and flashier.
Seven Corners, according to my wife, offers something the others often do not: staffers who know what the frack they’re talking about, and can expertly guide her through tool-and-supply purchases for her home-remodeling projects.
Seven Corners’ intricate, tightly packed inventory is amazing, too. Though selection at big boxes is potentially greater, I lost count of the times my wife found some weird doodad or widget at Seven Corners that no other hardware store had.
My wife became such a fixture at Seven Corners that, years ago, for her birthday, I had all the retail staffers sign a card to go with a power drill (purchased at Seven Corners, natch) she uses to this day.
Our son became a bit of a celebrity at Seven Corners as the workers saw him grow from a baby to a toddler to a schoolchild — all while we lived in a downtown high-rise condo just a few blocks away.
My wife’s visits petered out a bit when we moved out to a residential neighborhood, but the guys never forgot about my kid (now in high school), and always ask about him. Lyle Kuehn, the bearded, Santa-like dude seen in the pictures and video here, is the one I’ll remember the most.
Though I’m not crazy about Seven Corners (sorry, guys, I just don’t like hardware stores), I like those Seven Corners workers very much. I admire how they have the locations of every screw, glue and such in the jam-packed two-story facility hardwired into their cerebral cortices, and make a beeline for it upon request.
I’m enchanted by how they eschew digital-age transaction-processing tech to fill out their purchase invoices by hand and calculate the totals on a physical calculator. Though this has dismayed me a smidgen given my role as a technology writer and cheerleader, and tested my patience when I’m in a hurry, I’ve never said a word about this — and I’ve never wanted the guys to change a thing.
I’m heartbroken for them now.
Seven Corners management has announced it is shuttering the store and selling the property to a big private developer. It’s the end of a local, and national, institution. The store’s printed catalogs are legend.
So, for generations of St. Paulites, are those store guys.
They were the first thought in wife’s head when I told her Seven Corners Hardware would be no more. “What will happen to them?” she said. “And who will help me with my projects? The people at those other places are hopeless.”
This is not progress, for all the modernity of Lowe’s and its ilk. This is a tragedy.
Photos here by John Doman of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. See more of his Seven Corners photos here. Video by John Brewer of the Pioneer Press.
Today's Joy of Tech comic!
