Grover's

Maybe I’m just attracted to clutter, but damn I sure do love shopping at Grover Utzinger’s hardware store. If you’ve never been there you need to put it on your list of must visit old timey shops in Dried Salmon County. Grover’s is the second shop on the left just after you cross the Old Youngs Bay Bridge. It looks like a small shop and by the standards of the modern hardware stores, but every thing anyone could possibly need is in there.

You can enter the shop and think you see everything, but no, there is a door to this little goat path cat walk where the nuts and bolts are kept. You need pipe? That another door that you need to go through and ends you up in this room that looks like a garage, which is nearly the size of the main shop. Need a plastic septic tank? He’s got them outside.

Grover’s is a Mom and Pop and a couple of kids shop. It has everything but open space. I don’t remember which franchise it is under, maybe True Value, but a few years back they had to join the modern world and set their inventory up on a computer. It was demanded by the head office. It seemed to inconvenience them greatly, but they plodded through into modern times, but when you go there now, the computer is turned on but never used. You bill is prepared on a calculator and if you need a receipt, you’ll get one that is hand written or one from the register.

In that shop Grover is the computer. He seems to know every product and the quantity of that product in his store. I have yet to see him run out of anything, except maybe lamp oil when the power was out for three days around here.

So pay a visit and look around. I’m sure you’ll see things you’ve never seen before. Most of all you’ll see a store of yester-year.