My mother's shop

My mother ran a hardware shop in a town of four thousand people for thirty-one years, and if you had told her she was an entrepreneur she'd have asked you what you were selling. I took it over the year she turned seventy. I'd been in Dublin doing marketing for a software company that made something to do with logistics, I was never fully sure what, and I came home for Christmas and found her on a stepladder in the stockroom with her knee strapped up, counting hinges. "Get down off that," I said. "Who's going to count them, the cat?" That was more or less the interview. I had, I'll admit, ideas. I'd sat in enough meetings about "customer journeys" to think I knew something. The first month I built a website. The second month I put in a card machine that didn't need you to sign a chit. The third month I tried to stop stocking the things that hadn't sold in a year, and that's where it got interesting. "You can't get rid of the paraffin," Mam said. She still came in on Tuesdays. Officially to do the books, actually to supervise. "Nobody's bought paraffin since I've been here." "Dessie Fahy buys paraffin." "Dessie Fahy hasn't been in." "He will be. When the power goes in February he'll be in, and if we don't have it he'll drive to Ennis, and while he's in Ennis he'll buy his screws and his bird seed and the wellies for the grandson, and he won't come back." I left the paraffin. Dessie Fahy came in the first week of February, bought two cans and a bag of nails, and stood at the counter for forty minutes telling me about the drainage on his back field. Mam didn't say anything. She didn't have to. What I hadn't understood, coming from the city, was that the shop was not a shop. It was a piece of infrastructure. People came in to ask which plumber was reliable, whether the tip was open on a bank holiday, if anyone had seen a grey collie. My mother had been running a search engine for three decades with a filing system that lived entirely in her head.

I've been at it four years now. The website gets about six orders a month, mostly from people who used to live here and want a specific brand of floor polish they can't find in England. The card machine was a good call; she admits that. I've added a small section of what I'd have once called "curated homewares" and she calls "the dear candles," and they sell, to her visible annoyance. The thing I actually changed, the thing that mattered, was hours. I open at seven now instead of nine, because I noticed the builders' vans going past at quarter to eight, heading for Ennis. Now they stop. They buy a coffee from the machine I put in and whatever they've forgotten, and by half eight I've done more business than Mam did by noon. "You could have just asked me," she said when I told her the numbers. "Would you have told me?" "I'd have told you the builders start at eight." She thought about it. "I might not have said the rest." Last week a young fella from the enterprise board came in with a leaflet about a mentoring programme for rural businesses. He asked if I'd ever considered scaling. I said I'd consider it if he could tell me where the second town of four thousand people was going to come from. He laughed like I'd made a joke. Mam was in the corner doing the VAT. She didn't look up. "Ask him does he want paraffin," she said.