The Country Has Started Asking What I Know

Cedar Valley News
May 13, 2026
The Country Has Started Asking What I Know
By Lars Olson

A man came into the hardware store on Saturday with a piece of a washing machine in his hand.

He set it on the counter. A small white plastic part, two prongs at one end, a snapped tab on the other, wrapped in a clean shop rag like a person carrying a broken bird. He told me the machine was twenty-eight years old. His wife had bought it new in 1998. The repair shop he called would not come out because the part was no longer manufactured. He asked me if I could help.

I have been running this hardware store for forty-one years. The man on Saturday was the seventh customer in six weeks to come in with a piece of something old in his hand, looking for help.

Something has shifted.

In January, the wire services carried a story about what is being called the fix-first mindset. Inflation has made replacement cost what it never used to cost. Right-to-repair laws are in effect in California, New York, and Minnesota. Repair cafes have started showing up around the country. YouTube and TikTok are full of tutorials. The story ran in dozens of small papers in January, and the cameras moved on.

The cameras moved on. The customers did not.

The man on Saturday is sixty-six. His wife has been doing the laundry in a Whirlpool machine for twenty-eight years. To him, the machine is a member of the household. He did not come into my store because he had seen a tutorial. He came in because he was raised by a father who knew the machine was made of parts, and parts could be replaced, and replacement was what you did before you threw something away.

I found him the part. It was forty-one dollars. The new washing machine he was being told to buy was four hundred and eighty.

Twenty years ago, when something broke in a customer’s house, they walked in and asked which new one to buy. I pointed them at the shelf. They left with a replacement. The old item went to the dump.

Now, when something breaks, half of them come in asking how to fix it. They are not all old. The young couple who bought the bungalow on Fifth Street came in last month with a leaking sink trap, and the husband, twenty-nine, had already watched three YouTube videos. He did not know what a J-bend was. He knew he wanted to fix it. I showed him. He came back the next day and told me he had done it.

This is the part the wire story did not tell you.

The country is rediscovering a kind of competence the major outlets cannot supply. The young husband watched the video. The video could not put the wrench in his hand. The video could not be in the room when he tightened the slip nut too hard, causing it to crack. I was in the room. I was the room. The hardware store is the room.

The country has started asking what I know.

I am not the only one being asked. The man at the auto parts counter. The lady at the fabric shop. The retired electrician next door. The grandfathers in the garages. The grandmothers at the sewing machines. We have all started getting asked questions we have not been asked in twenty-five years.

It is not because we have suddenly become smart. We were always smart. The country forgot, for a generation, to ask us.

I am not romanticizing. Most customers who come in to fix something will still throw the next thing away. The man on Saturday is a sign of a thing beginning, not a thing finished. What is happening at my counter now did not happen ten years ago.

If you have something broken at your house, do not throw it out yet. Bring it down. Or call someone who fixes things. There are more of us than you think. We have been waiting to be asked.

There is something broken in your house. You know what it is. Tell us about it on the Facebook page, and tell us what you did with it.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. The fix-it stories are welcome too — what you saved, what you taught, what you learned. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the right-to-repair laws in California, New York, and Minnesota, the wire-service reporting on the fix-first mindset in January 2026, and the repair cafe movement are real.

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