Musing on…How Hardware Stores Have Changed

As my current life situation allows me to go back to a decades-long interest in woodworking, I find myself in lots of hardware (a/k/a home-improvement) stores. Things have changed a bit since I was a kid, trying desperately to keep up as my dad searched through the aisles for the right nail, the unwarped board, or the right brand of wood stain. It’s amazing what an absence of two-plus decades can do.

My first reaction, well…after the arrr, arrr, arrr…tools reaction, was:

where are all the men? Time was the only women in a hardware store were the ones looking at paint chips. Now, almost all of the employees, and a clear majority of the customers were female. I’ve noticed this in just about every hardware store (chain and small-business) in the city except for a couple of mom-and-pop places. Life-long feminist that I am, it’s not something I mind, but it did catch my attention. And my curiosity…why have women taken over the home-improvement business (at least in my city)?

My first reaction was: Lynette Jennings! She’s to blame. Then again, long before the Discovery Channel started broadcasting the tool-wielding Canadian, there was the PBS show Hometime…where Dean Johnson always had a female partner (the two most notable being the pseudo-wife JoAnne Liebler, as well as the faux-partner Robin Hartl). And now there’s HGTV.

Still, it doesn’t really explain how this paradigm shift happened. Is it wages? Is it that this is the only working-with-tools job most women are allowed to hold while the men still go out and do construction? Just a quirk of my little burg? I don’t have any answers, but I must say that my curiosity is piqued.