Biography

70-Years-old.  Retired 31.03.2025 after 46 years managing small, single unit retail hardware store employing 12 to 36 staff.   Once played guitar; now difficult with neuropathic issues.  Married.  Two children now in their mid-thirties. One granddaughter 15 months.  Four-year BA degree from small New England College near Boston, Massachusetts. Subscribe to Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Atlantic Magazine, The Economist, The American Spectator, The British Spectator, The American Conservative, The Free Press. Various Substack authors. I post occasionally to Substack under WILLIAM ROUND. I intend to post accounts of my years on the sales floor in a small store operating in dramatically changing societal and economic times with a sometime theme of recalling my classic New England Yankee Father and his companion basset hounds.  Former board of directors member at Standard Hardware Distributors, Merrimack, NH (now defunct). Former board of director member for industry segment workman's compensation self-insurance group. Once active on committees with True Value for retail store automation, communications, and data integrity.  Chaired various committees of store owners presenting concerns to corporate managers at True Value and other suppliers.  Wrote frequently for early email lists and user groups of stores running Epicor (once Triad and Activant) system products. Ran user system user groups in the late 1980's and 90's.  Sang in church choirs and community choral groups.  After a year's decompression from years of seventy-hour work weeks, I need to find new things to do.  I was told that it was best to retire into something that was already running or could be up and running quickly.  I agree with that.  I was told that I would enjoy retirement, that I would miss the customers, but that I would not miss the business.  This is at least partially right.  I do miss my business, but I'm still glad to be out.  Another former store owner said that after he retired, it were as though the customers all... died.  I can agree with that.  Short of going back to work in a retail store in the general vicinity of my old location, I will not see the people I had frequent contact with over several decades again.  I miss the conversations and the outright characters I dealt with.  Years ago I would encounter people with interesting if not tremendous backgrounds, though I must say the old guard was a much more interesting group.  I met at various times an assistant to "Doc Edgerton," an MIT university professor who engineered the high-speed cameras used to record the first atomic bomb test.  There were all sorts of people associated with Raytheon, MIT, General Electric, Digital Equipment, Harvard, and the now long-gone mini and micro computer companies.  The Cold War drove all sorts of high-tech engineering and manufacturing in Massachusetts.  I remember on guy who specialized in building scientific instrument reproductions.  He bought a lot of wood stain used to age his replicas of Galileo telescopes. Another was a mechanic with General Clair Chenault and the Flying Tigers in China.  Yet another used to come in with a WWI campaign hat.  He was quite elderly.  My father said this buyer of bug spray had been on the executive staff with General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines. My modern day customers were a dull, plebeian, pedestrian group.  Maybe I'm unfair to them.  

My store and real estate interests are gone.  I don't have to worry about any of the old issues like customers, inventory, systems, and forklift hydraulics.  The "Three T's" of commercial real estate are behind me:  Tenants, Trash and Taxes.  They're all somebody else's concern, and a good thing, too.  I think the times had changed too quickly. I aged out a long time ago.  The big box stores and Amazon delivery trucks had made me obsolete; it just took me a long time to realize it. Perhaps with all my free time I'll be able to record my thoughts and impressions, to capture the essence of my parents and the effects they had upon me and so many others. As I said, the older generations were so much more interesting than the current ones.  I hope, that as I age and tell my own stories, that I will not descend into boredom and irrelevance...  

Bill Round

Lynnfield, MA

May 10, 2026