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" John Waslenko, 63, is the owner of Thornridge Hardware Supply in Levittown, Pennsylvania. \u2022 This is a family-owned and -operated store. My dad bought it in 1967. It was an existing hardware store.  \u2022 I was 16 years old. Our high school was right across the street, so I used to just cut across the field and come to work after school, stocking and cleaning shelves and organizing merchandise.  \u2022 We pretty much ran it together. We were always questioning each other. He passed away in &amp;#039;95 of cancer, and I&amp;#039;ve been running it ever since. \u2022 We&amp;#039;re in a development that was built by William J. Levitt. So we have 24,000 homes that were built in the &amp;#039;50s to support the people who worked for U.S. Steel. Between that and General Motors and 3M Company, everyone was employed by very large manufacturers. \u2022 You get maintenance men in from apartments or some of our industrial plants and they&amp;#039;re asking you questions about how to do something. They know that we know what we&amp;#039;re talking about. \u2022 We&amp;#039;re in our third generation here. My son Dan is in the store now. You&amp;#039;ll see the old-timers come in and they&amp;#039;re in their 70s and 80s now. They&amp;#039;re coming in with walkers, but they&amp;#039;re still coming here, after 47 years.  \u2022 Dan&amp;#039;s 25. He does all the computer stuff. Kids love everything computers. So he does the inventory. He&amp;#039;ll take care of all the defective merchandise. He runs all the reports. \u2022 You have to be on top of your inventory. It&amp;#039;s too costly not to be. Inventory is the key to survival. \u2022 We can go start to finish on a project and give a person everything he needs, because most of us here have already done that project. It&amp;#039;s kind of like you&amp;#039;re a bartender. Everyone has a story to tell you.  \u2022 We get tradesmen who do what they do five days a week\u2014they know the shortcuts. They tell you what makes the job a whole lot easier, and then you can turn around to a customer and say, &amp;quot;Hey, this guy was just in. He told me how to do this. It&amp;#039;ll probably work for you.&amp;quot; \u2022 We&amp;#039;ve got guys who are working on a faucet or hooking up a drain. It&amp;#039;s like, &amp;quot;This is my fourth trip today.&amp;quot; They&amp;#039;re the kind of guys you want to joke around with and have a good time. They&amp;#039;re wasting time, but they&amp;#039;re having fun. \u2022 Hard work pays off.  \u2022 I&amp;#039;ve seen 14 hardware stores come and go in our area, and yet we&amp;#039;re still here. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/reviews/a11167/the-collected-wisdom-of-john-waslenko-hardware-store-owner-17143100/>