dave@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Sherman) (02/14/84)
Along the same lines as the "nut and bolt shop" (which I've never seen in Canada, by the way) are the packages of tools. When we bought a house about a year ago, I bought such a package from Consumers Distributing (a Canadian catalogue-store chain) for $50. The tools are made in Taiwan and their quality is generally rotten, but as far as I'm concerned it was worth it. There are something like 120 tools in the box. If I had gone to a hardware store and started buying individual tools, I would have bought many fewer of everything and still spent much more. I would have figured I didn't *need* a level, or sets of wrenches in both imperial and metric, or screwdrivers with short handles, or screwdrivers in 15 different shapes and sizes, or the plethora of saws and other gizmos. Yet all those things have come in useful at unexpected times, because they were there. Now that I've started using tools around the house, the ones which get a lot of use are breaking (for example, the hammer BENT when I tried to remove a nail from a two-by-four!). But that's OK, because I only need to replace a very few tools. Dave Sherman Thornhill -- {allegra,cornell,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo}!utcsrgv!dave