'Those days are gone': Corydon Avenue's long-standing independent hardware shop set to close

There was a time when Corydon Hardware resonated with sounds.

An almost ceaseless jangle of entry bells synthesized with the cutting of keys, nails clattering on a metal scale, the resonant chug of paint cans being shaken and the din of conversation.

Before the ubiquitousness of coffee shops in Winnipeg's Corydon Village area, the small store was a gathering place. People came for talk as much as tools. And they went home with plenty of both.

The store catered to home improvement in a neighbourhood defined by century-old houses. Its owners — first Edward Benson, then his son, Michael, and then Michael's son, Rob — knew exactly what was needed and where it was.

And they knew how to fix most anything, providing advice along with the product.

But after 75 years in business, the clatter and conversation are falling silent.

Rob Benson, who started working at Corydon Hardware as a teen in the 1980s before buying it from his dad in the early 2000s, is hanging the going-out-of-business banner.

"That's the hardest thing for me, because it's been in the family since 1949. So that's tough," he said. "Business is not improving, it's getting worse. So to try to draw it out longer seems kind of pointless.

"You're knocking your head against the brick wall here."

The idea of closing crept across his mind a few years ago, but Benson suppressed it, hoping to ride out the downturn like so many prior economic slumps. 

The current one is not a slump, though. It's a wholesale change in consumer demand, he said. And there's no room for Corydon Hardware.

"Maybe it took me a while to realize that, yes, I do have to give it up. I didn't really want to, but I finally realized it's not working and it's not going to continue to function as a viable business," he said, as a teenaged boy — as if on cue — asked if Benson was hiring.

"Those days are gone," he said after the boy left.

Benson said he can't, in good conscience, sell the business to someone else when there's no business to run.