AN INDEPENDENT REMEMBERS


“I WAS MORE INTERESTED IN WHAT MISTAKES


Novice buyers, new listings and musings about Stanley tools… our independent hardwareman takes a step back in time with part 30 of his stories from the shop floor.


NOT TO MAKE MYSELF” T


he bigger shop also meant we were increasingly asked for smaller stuff; mainly spare parts for large-ticket


items bought elsewhere. Top of the list were MFI fittings – in fact, all of the little blocks and clips that held this mass-produced, flat-pack “furniture” together (if not for very long). Quite often, parts were missing in the packs, or they broke sometime after


assembly,


thus creating a huge demand for replacements.


MFI, so we were told countless times, wasn’t interested and employed staff who were trained in verbal combat with disgruntled customers.


And no, standard 12 DIY WEEK 23 NOVEMBER 2018


Conti-joints and generic shelf studs simply wouldn’t do. I spent hours on the phone trying to source the kosher ones, but it would be well over 10 years later that I finally discovered some enterprising pattern maker who’d spotted an opportunity and gone for it. But in the 1980s we could unfortunately only offer our customers nothing except a sympathetic ear.


Counter-fire The interlopers who’d warned us that they were determined to open up a hardware shop in this town had caused something of a stir with the local paper’s adverts and greasily-written articles. Do I sound bitter? You bet I was, because much of it was pure


hype! So, members of the public, desperate to mix something more satisfying than mortar or Polyfilla, would come to our shop for a bit of a dig at them. “They’re selling 40ft of two-by-one at such-and-such a price,” they’d tell us, as if we didn’t already know.


I would tell them we were doing only 20ft for the same unit price. Yes, it was from the same source, and it was crap quality, but at least it was a point of counter-fire (and fit only for burning, if truth be told). But our competitors weren’t only becoming infamous with the public. Read on. For years we’d been asked to supply Milliput,


the epoxy-based


putty. None of our suppliers had it. Then one day, a one-man-band


wholesaler came in and plonked two boxes of it on the counter. “’Ere, I’ll bet you’ve been wanting to get your hands on this stuff for a long time.” He went on to say that, finally, he was prepared to let us have some, and that he’d been rather slow to get round to see us because he usually dealt with only one outlet per town, but now he’d had enough of “those cowboys round there”. Furthermore, he was prepared


to break his own rule about client confidentiality and tell us exactly what he thought about those people (only I don’t think he used that very term). Apparently, they had embarrassed and humiliated him in front of a shop full of customers. So what had gone wrong? It wasn’t a case of me having a


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