Hardware in the Peg

Pollock's is a great little hardware store at 1407 Main St., north of the Exchange District. It's pretty much what you'd have in mind if you tried to imagine a decent neighborhood hardware store. Nice atmosphere, nice organization, good stock, quality stock, smart and helpful co-op workers.

More affluent towns in the States sometimes have decent neighborhood Ace hardware stores, but in Winnipeg it's usually either big box or a tiny, dirty, semi-barren, crazy mish-mosh store owned by an elderly couple who are barely eking out an existence. Pollock's is a rare exception. It's a co-op that was founded when the elderly couple who were barely eaking out an existence left or died (the history link on their website's not up and running yet). The North-end community got together and raised the funds to buy the shop, in order to maintain a neighborhood hardware store. They spruced it up.

Prices are a little dear. I bought a reel (push) mower at Pollock's in 2009 for $200; but again, from an American's perspective, goods are expensive in Canada. I was happy to support a quality neighborhood co-op. Anyway, the last reel mower I'd bought, from Sears a couple years back, had been manufactured so that the blades couldn't be sharpened. Unbelievable! They're monsters (Believe me, I tried to get some accountability out of them. Sears' mower department slogan should be Caveat Emptor). So that was $100 pretty much down the drain for a one-summer-use-only disposable mower. This Pollack's mower is a bargain by comparison. It works great, is easy to use, and can be sharpened, so I can use it for about a century. That's good because Winnipeg summers are short. I wouldn't want to be buying a mower every two years for three months of growing grass.

Big Box Hardware

Beyond Pollack's, if you're near Osborne, you can shop at MacDiarmid's ("mc-der'-mitts") which is a small box store. You'll find pretty lame product quality there, but only slightly more lame than what you'd get at Rona (the Canadian Home Depot) and Home Depot (which dedicates part of its profits to busting the working class), both pushing the sprawl on the edges of town.

If you want to match paint to a swatch, you have to go to Home Despot. They've got the most reliable computer color scanner. The other hardware stores' scanners are actually fairly bad--pink for orange, that kind of thing. Frustrating and costly.

Big box hardware stores in Winnipeg do not have the selection or goods quality of American big box hardware stores. The available selection will bring to mind what you might have found in a small American town before the 1990s economic bubble: tacky, and sketchy quality. You'll never find decent tile or lighting or toilet accessories, a basic-but-elegant drawer pull, or a modern gas fireplace in a Canadian big box hardware store. That is one reason (along with the crappy-yet-costly MDF furniture stores) why if there was ever a town that actually needed an IKEA, Winnipeg would be it. Not because IKEA is quality or its prices reflect their social and environmental costs (Which costs a capitalist business has to pass on, because in capitalism, negative externalization is the name of the game.); but because at IKEA, at least they design some things not simply for profit but also for use by contemporary primates-- and you don't pay an arm and a leg for their white-washed, glued sawdust.

But the wood flooring is surprisingly affordable at the Winnipeg big boxes.

For an attractive, mercantile-style store model that successfully sells plants and organic gardening supplies, organic toiletries, and high-quality kitchen ware, see Eugene, Oregon's Down to Earth store. This mercentile model could be modified to fit another city's (Winnipeg's) economy, perhaps featuring more hardware and low-VOC paint and plaster.