The other day one of my neighbors hooked me up with some industrial metal shelving for the garage. It was very generous of him and quite the score for me, but I ended up needing 80 – 100 machine screws to put it all together… nothing out of the ordinary, just some 1/4-20 flat-heads would do nicely, so off to Lowes I went.

They had them in those little drawers, but in Stainless Steel at 2 for $2.00 I was looking at $80 – $100 just for screws… not for this project. You know that finding someone half-way decent to help at these places is hit & miss and I can generally find what I want by myself, but one of the workers found some brass ones for me. I was still looking at $60 and didn’t want brass anyway. Off to Home Depot.

Home Depot also had them in brass for close to the same price as Lowes (I guess there’s a lot of boat builders here in land-locked Colorado) and then I found the ones I wanted, but in those stupid little plastic packages for 4 for $0.98 . That’s still $25 bucks and I guess I’m too ‘old school’ because it wasn’t so much the price anymore as it was that you can’t seem to get a box of zinc coated machine screws at a hardware store. I walked out thinking, “If they don’t have what I need, they might as well have nothing”, a comment I’d heard growing up, from my father to more than one salesperson as he’d walk out of a store . Continue Reading »