After my dad’s back surgery, I spent six years running his hardware store. But when my younger sister came home with a business degree and proposed cutting a longtime employee’s hours from 40 to 12 a week, I refused. Dad shouted in front of the crew, “Your sister earned a business degree. All you’ve ever done is take,” then took the store keys off the hook and put them in her hand

I never called a single person who worked at Dad’s store and asked them to leave. Not one. I never called a single customer. I had every contractor’s cell number in my phone. I didn’t use one. What happened at Rex’s hardware in those four weeks, Aubrey did all on her own. The first week, she ordered the self-checkout machines, two of them, the kind you see at the big box stores with the screens and the scales.

She also signed up for a whole new register system with a company out of Dallas that put tablets on the counter and came with a 5-year contract. Dad signed for it. It cost more per month than Chad’s paycheck. The second week, she closed the repair counter. She put a sign on it that said, “Repair services discontinued.

Thank you for your understanding. There were 11 mowers back there waiting to be fixed, and she called every owner and told them to come pick them up, unfixed. One of them was Otis Grim’s old John Deere riding mower with a bad carburetor. Otis came and looked at the sign and asked Herb where I’d gone, and Herb told him.

Otis left his mower right where it was. He said he’d wait until somebody in that building knew what they were doing. The same week, she cut Chad to 12 hours and handed out headsets, little black headsets with a microphone. so the staff could talk to each other across the store. Aubrey had seen them at a big home improvement store in Kansas City and thought they’d make us look modern.

Braden, the high-school kid, put his on, wore it for one shift, and quit that evening. He said he felt like he was working at a drive-thru. He had a point. Herb was next. Herb had been planning to retire when he turned 70 anyway, which was in September. But the new register system had a tablet with tiny buttons, and Herb’s fingers are about the size of a carrot each.

On his third day with it, a line backed up to the bolt bins and Aubrey stood next to him and kept saying, “Tap then swipe. Tap then swipe.” Herb finished that line, laid his headset on the counter, and said, “Young lady, I’m retiring early.” Then she sold the key machine. That machine was older than me. It was a big green machine that Dad bought used in 1999, and I’d learned to cut keys on it standing on a bucket.

Aubrey decided keys were a low margin service line, too. Sold it to a man who buys scrap metal by the pound. I heard she got $60 for it. The next week, a woman from the nursing home came in for a key and got sent to the big box store in town. And that woman went home and told everybody at the nursing home, and everybody at the nursing home has children.

Then Aubrey changed the paint. We’d carried the same paint brand for 20 years. Joan knew every base and every tint of it by heart. Aubrey switched us to a cheaper line with better profit, and the first time Joan tried to match a color with the new tint machine, it came out the color of a bruise.

Joan worked two more weeks. Then she put her name tag in the drawer and went home. Dusty left for the lumber yard on the west side of town, which paid 50 cents more an hour and didn’t make anybody wear a headset. And Ricky, the delivery driver, ran out of things to deliver because the contractor accounts were gone.

That was the one that hurt the store most, though nobody could see it yet. For 20 years, a builder could walk into Rex’s hardware, load up a truck with lumber and nails and joist hangers, sign a slip, and pay at the end of the month. Aubrey ended it. Card at the counter every time.

No exceptions. Two of the builders asked to talk to the owner, and Aubrey told them she was the owner now. They didn’t argue. They just stopped coming in. And Ricky, who’d been running two or three lumber loads a day for those builders, was down to one a week. Aubrey cut his hours to match.

Ricky has three kids. Chad was the one who called me first. It was a Thursday night in the middle of all that. I was at the repair bench in Hale with the back door open for the breeze working on a chainsaw for a woman who said her husband would never let her hear the end of it if she couldn’t cut up the limb that fell on his truck.