And if you couldn't find what you were looking for, you wandered around until you found Mr. Schwartz or Mr. Arnitz or whatever the owner's name was. He was only too willing to stop whatever he was doing to give you guidance and counsel about your problem.

You could—and I did—spend a lot of time in this kind of hardware store just looking. There's something fascinating to men (and maybe to women, too) about hardware. You never seemed to have exactly the part you needed when you came to do a job around the house, and so you had to take a trip to the hardware store. This visit often seemed to coincide with your wife's need for weed pulling or lawn mowing or even just doing the dishes. Clearly, a visit to the hardware store was more interesting than any of these tasks and more important (at least in your eyes) than whatever she needed done.

But, alas, neighborhood hardware stores no longer exist, or at the least they are sparse in number and few and far between. The last one in my neighborhood gave up, closed its doors and sold off its inventory about 10 years ago.

Now all that's left are what are called Big Box stores, giant warehouses with huge supplies of hardware, lumber and other building materials stacked in unattractive piles to the ceiling and presided over by "associates" who seem to be mostly invisible and often not very knowledgeable.

"Sorry, that's not my department," they tend to reply to questions.

Or more likely they're just not there. That's because it appears to me that most Big Box hardware places are short-staffed. I guess it is because help is expensive and the margin of profit in a Big Box is so narrow. In any event, finding a clerk, let alone a friendly one, often is not easy.

Big Box stores aren't interested in the neighborhood, not really, even though their television commercials say they are. They're interested in the bottom line, the quarterly dividend paid to their stockholders. Goodwill is another matter and not a profit center, apparently.

Big Box stores usually don't sell things as single items either. More often hardware is packaged in pairs or fours or more. You may need only one faucet or two screws or one toilet wax ring, but you might have to buy two—or more. That's the way the packages come.

No more are Mr. Schwartz or Mr. Arnitz in evidence. They retired a long time ago to Southern California or Florida or maybe even Hawaii. Whatever they knew about hardware—which in my experience was a lot—went with them. You have to look long and hard to find someone in a Big Box who has spent a lifetime with hardware.

So you don't often just wander into a present-day hardware emporium (I hesitate to call Big Boxes "stores"; I really don't know what to call them). If you do, you're likely to get run over, either by the customers or the "associates" who are usually heading somewhere you're not. And in a hurry.

Finally, there is the problem of getting out of a Big Box. In Mr. Schwartz's store, ringing up a purchase was a pleasant chore. You had a chance to check on neighborhood gossip while he worked the cash register.

Not so, now. At least one Big Box, unable even to pay the minimum wage for checkers, has resorted to real self-service. You check yourself out, passing your purchases under a bar-code reader, using your credit card to pay for what you've bought and bagging it yourself (if you can find a bag somewhere).

I suppose this helps keep the cost down, but it sure takes all the fun out of going to the hardware store.

All of which leads me to wonder if there really is such a thing as progress. We were raised on the principle that as time passed, things got better. Maybe so, but I'm not sure that theory works when it comes to hardware.