The Sale
Harlan was ninety that spring, and his son in Arizona did not want a hardware store, so he sold to Corbin and Hale Home and Farm Supply, a company out of Sioux Falls with forty-one stores across four states.
I was not afraid at first. Harlan sat me down in the back room the week before the closing, with a cup of the awful coffee he made in a percolator older than I was.
“Harold, I put your name in front of their lawyer,” he said. “Thirty years in November. They know. They said they will honor the plan, every dime. I made them say it twice.”
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“Thank you, Harlan.”
“Don’t thank me. Just stay out of the way of the forklift.” He patted my arm, and I remember his hand was light as a sparrow.
For a while not much changed after the takeover, except that a man from the district came through with a clipboard and counted my hooks.
Then, the following June, they sent us Trent Mabry. He was thirty-one years old, tall, polite, with the kind of haircut that costs money and a lanyard with a badge on it, and he came to us with a title: Store Leader.
I will say this for him now. He shook everyone’s hand the first morning and learned every clerk’s name before lunch. What he did not do was ask me one question about the store.
He stood at the end of my counter on his third day, looking at the oak. “We’re going to open this up,” he said. “More floor space.”
Two weeks later a crew installed a key kiosk beside the front door. A gray metal box with a touch screen, and it cost the company $9,400, which I know because the invoice was sitting on the printer. Customers fed it a key and a credit card, and it spat out a copy in ninety seconds with no one to say good morning. It cut about one key in three correctly.
I should have read that kiosk for what it was. I had spent twenty-nine years inside that store, and I could not see the wall being built around me.