The Hardware Store that Ate Home Depot
Kevin Kelly's (not
the Irish one) Cool Tools
points to the
McMaster-Carr Online Catalogue. Kelly describes it as "everything you need to build anything." The website claims over 410,00 products, 98% of them shipping from McMaster-Carr's stock.
When I read Kevin Kelly's description, I thought of an online version of a very large Home Depot.
But the site is something very different. When I was growing up in rural Grass Lake, Michigan, I used to spend hours walking around in Wolfinger's Hardware Store, the sort of claustrophobic, massively overcrowded, bustling place you see in movies about settlers on the prairie (and which you still see in small towns everywhere across America). Extremely narrow aisles towered, floor to ceiling, with bins of nails and bolts, every possible variation that a ten-year-old boy could think of, and then some. You could smell the zinc in the air. I'd bring in fifty cents and buy a bag of lag bolts. Not because I needed them, but because having them made my ten-year-old self feel
capable.
(There's a similar place in Hopkinton, where I live now, called "Wilber's Hardware." Last spring, when I was replacing the ceramic valve in our Moen faucet, I dropped in there to see if they had one. It's not, as far as I can tell, a commonly purchased item. They had one. They were perplexed why someone would buy a $25 ceramic filter for a faucet, but, still, they had it and they sold it to me.)
Those little, tiny bits of text? They're individual links, one for every three or four words. I didn't have time to count them, but I'm guessing there are several thousand links--these are just categories--on the first page of the site.
It's Wolfinger's Hardware Store, only about 10,000 of them packed into a space the
size of a Home Depot. Every inch extremely crowded with variation, overloaded. Nothing here is "designed." The information archicture is horrid by modern standards, but I sort of like it.
[via
Cool Tools]
Posted by johndan at July 23, 2004 08:36 PM
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