Long before Etsy shops, print-on-demand and selling something from a laptop were considered normal, my grandfather ran a Western Auto store in small-town Iowa. I didn’t realize it then, but I was watching my first entrepreneur.
By Curtiss Wayne Andrews
Before there was Amazon, there was the hardware store.
Before there was DoorDash, there was a kid on a bicycle.
Before there were Etsy shops, Shopify stores, print-on-demand companies and people filming themselves explaining how they made $742 last Tuesday while you somehow accomplished nothing…
…there was Grandpa Wayne.
And Western Auto.
Growing up, I didn’t think of my grandfather as an entrepreneur.
He was just Grandpa.
His store was just the store.
But looking back now—after spending much of my adult life experimenting with businesses, publishing books, selling products online and trying more side hustles than any reasonable person probably should—I realize something.
Grandpa Wayne was my first business education.
I just didn’t know I was enrolled.
When the Hardware Store Was Part of the Town
Grandpa Wayne operated a Western Auto store in Nevada, Iowa, back when businesses like his were woven into the fabric of small-town America.
For anyone too young to remember Western Auto, imagine a place where hardware store, auto-parts shop, sporting-goods department and general store all got shoved under one roof.
You needed a spark plug?
They had it.
A wrench?
Probably.
Fishing gear?
Sure.
Something for the lawn?
Go see Wayne.
And unlike today’s shopping experience, there wasn’t an algorithm quietly following you around the store suggesting:
CUSTOMERS WHO PURCHASED THIS SOCKET WRENCH ALSO BOUGHT THESE SIX COMPLETELY UNRELATED THINGS.
There was a person behind the counter.
He knew what he sold.
More importantly, he knew the people buying it.
That’s the part I’ve come to appreciate more as I’ve gotten older.
The store wasn’t simply a place where merchandise changed hands.
It was a relationship business.
Customers came in because they needed something, but they also came in because they knew who was standing behind the counter.
Reputation mattered.
Your word mattered.
If you sold somebody something lousy, there wasn’t an endless supply of anonymous customers arriving tomorrow from a Facebook ad.
You might see the unhappy customer at church.
Or the grocery store.
Or the gas station.
Or probably all three.
Customer retention was considerably more awkward in a small town.
I Thought I Was Hanging Out With Grandpa
I spent time around that store as a kid.
At the time, I certainly wasn’t standing there thinking:
I should carefully observe these interactions because they will inform my entrepreneurial philosophy several decades from now.
I was a kid.
There were things to touch.
Displays to investigate. Gumball machines to shake down.
Probably something I wasn’t supposed to be messing with.
But those memories stayed with me.
I remember the feeling of a business filled with actual stuff.
Shelves.
Boxes.
Tools.
Parts.
Merchandise that had to be ordered, unpacked, stocked and eventually sold.
That’s an important distinction when I compare Grandpa’s business with the strange little enterprises I’ve built in the internet age.
Because Grandpa couldn’t upload a JPEG and call it inventory.
His inventory weighed something.
Grandpa Had to Buy the Stuff Before He Could Sell the Stuff
This may be one of the greatest differences between his entrepreneurial world and mine.
Running a retail store required capital.
Real capital.
You needed a physical location.
Fixtures.
Signs.
Utilities.
Inventory.
And if you guessed wrong about what people wanted?
Congratulations.
You now owned a lot of stuff nobody wanted.
Compare that with something like print-on-demand.
I’ve been involved in POD since 2020. The basic proposition still amazes me when I compare it to Grandpa’s generation.
I can create a design. Actually, thousands of them.
Upload it.
Make it available for sale.
And in many cases I don’t manufacture the physical product until somebody actually buys it.
Grandpa would probably have stared at me for several seconds.
“You sell it before you have it?”
Yep.
“And somebody else makes it?”
Yep.
“And somebody else ships it?”
Correct.
At that point, I’m fairly certain Grandpa would have begun questioning exactly what part of this business I was actually doing.
Fair question.
But that’s the extraordinary opportunity the internet created.
It separated entrepreneurship from owning a storefront.
The Store Couldn’t Stay Open While Grandpa Slept
Here’s another thing we’ve forgotten.
Grandpa’s Western Auto couldn’t sell a wrench at 2:14 in the morning.
Somebody had to unlock the door.
Turn on the lights.
Stand behind the counter.
Help customers.
Ring up purchases.
Restock shelves.
Close the store.
And come back tomorrow.
Weather didn’t particularly care.
Neither did customers.
The physical business required a physical human being.
Today, I’ve had books sell while I was asleep.
I’ve sold print-on-demand products while watching television.
Someone I’ve never met can find something I’ve created while sitting hundreds or thousands of miles away from me.
That would have sounded like science fiction when Grandpa was standing behind the counter.
And yet there’s a danger in thinking technology somehow eliminated the work.
It didn’t.
It moved the work.
Grandpa stocked shelves.
We optimize listings.
Grandpa arranged displays.
We make thumbnails.
Grandpa bought newspaper advertising.
We worry about keywords.
Grandpa wondered whether enough people in Nevada, Iowa, wanted what he had stocked.
We stare at analytics wondering why 11,000 people apparently looked at something and none of them bought the damn thing.
Different tools.
Same anxiety.
Grandpa Had Word of Mouth. We Have Algorithms.
Marketing may be where the contrast becomes funniest.
A local retailer like Grandpa relied heavily on the community.
People knew the store.
People told other people.
Maybe you advertised locally.
Maybe you ran a promotion.
Maybe somebody mentioned the business at church or work.
The potential audience had a geographic boundary.
Today I can publish something from my house and potentially put it in front of people around the world before lunch.
That’s incredible.
It’s also completely overwhelming.
Because Grandpa wasn’t competing with every hardware store on Earth.
We are.
Put a T-shirt online today and you’re competing with millions of other designs.
Publish a book and it joins an ocean of books.
Open an Etsy shop and discover 4,700 people apparently had your brilliant idea three years ago.
The barrier to entry became dramatically lower.
So did the barrier for everybody else.
That’s the trade.
Modern entrepreneurs need less money to enter the game.
But we’re entering a much bigger game.
The Old Store and My Obsession With Old Stuff
There’s another connection I didn’t recognize until recently.
I keep finding myself drawn to things from Grandpa’s world.
Old retail.
Old advertising.
Forgotten brands.
Roadside Americana.
Vintage Christmas.
Blow molds.
The physical objects that used to populate ordinary American life before everything became an app, a subscription or a brown cardboard box sitting outside your front door.
I’ve spent a considerable amount of time lately researching vintage holiday blow molds for The Glow That Won’t Go Out.
And there’s something familiar about that world.
Collectors talk about finding decorations at Sears.
K-Mart.
Hardware stores.
Local retailers.
They remember going shopping with their parents and seeing rows of glowing Santas and snowmen waiting to be taken home.
Those weren’t merely stores.
They became memory factories.
Nobody bought a plastic Santa thinking:
My child will become weirdly emotional about this object forty years from now.
They just bought a Christmas decoration.
But the kid remembered it.
That’s what fascinates me.
A Western Auto sign.
An old department-store catalog.
A blow mold Santa.
A roadside attraction.
An old diner.
These objects become little anchors connecting us to people and places that aren’t there anymore.
Maybe that’s part of why Grandpa’s store still occupies space in my head.
What Grandpa Understood That the Internet Can’t Automate
Technology changed almost everything about starting a small business.
But it didn’t change the most important part.
You still have to give somebody a reason to buy from you.
That’s it.
You can dress it up with modern terminology.
Conversion rates.
Funnels.
Customer acquisition.
SEO.
Engagement.
Optimization.
But Grandpa understood the fundamental equation without any of it.
Somebody walks into the store with a problem.
You help solve it.
They leave satisfied.
They come back.
They tell somebody else.
That’s business.
And increasingly, I think the people who succeed online are the ones who rediscover some version of that old Western Auto relationship.
Answer the email.
Stand behind what you sell.
Don’t pretend garbage is great because you need a sale.
Listen to what people actually want.
Be useful.
Earn trust.
Act like there’s a reasonable possibility you’re going to run into your customer at the grocery store tomorrow.
The internet could probably use more of that.
Grandpa Wayne Never Had a “Side Hustle”
This is where Side Hustle Revolution enters the story.
I dedicated the book to Grandpa Wayne.
Not because Grandpa spent his evenings watching videos titled 7 PASSIVE INCOME STREAMS YOU CAN START TODAY.
Thank God.
He belonged to a generation that didn’t need a trendy name for figuring out how to make a living.
You worked.
You sold something useful.
You solved problems.
You built relationships.
You took risks.
You watched expenses.
You kept going.
What we now call a side hustle is really an old instinct wrapped in new technology.
The revolutionary part isn’t that people suddenly discovered they could make money outside a traditional paycheck.
People have been doing that forever.
What’s revolutionary is access.
Grandpa needed a store.
I need a laptop.
Grandpa needed shelves.
I can need server space.
Grandpa needed inventory.
Sometimes I need a file.
Grandpa’s potential customer might have lived five miles away.
Mine might live five thousand miles away.
That’s an astonishing change.
But the principles underneath it would have been completely recognizable to him.
The Best Business Lesson Grandpa Never Actually Gave Me
I wish I could tell you Grandpa sat me down one afternoon in Western Auto and delivered a perfect speech about entrepreneurship.
He didn’t.
Most important lessons don’t happen that way.
You understand them later.
Sometimes much later.
What Grandpa taught me came from watching him.
Showing up.
Knowing your business.
Knowing your customer.
Selling something people actually need.
Taking care of your reputation.
And understanding that there is no magical substitute for doing the work.
Technology makes starting easier.
It does not make succeeding automatic.
That’s an important distinction in a world filled with people promising that AI, dropshipping, publishing, content creation, affiliate marketing or whatever arrives next Tuesday will generate effortless money.
There is no effortless Western Auto.
And there’s no effortless internet business either.
Somewhere Between Western Auto and Amazon
Sometimes I wonder what Grandpa Wayne would make of all this.
I think the technology would amaze him.
The idea that I could create a book and make it available around the world without personally storing boxes of copies?
Incredible.
Selling designs without owning a screen-printing operation?
Ridiculous.
Running a business from a couch?
Suspicious.
But I think he’d understand the motivation immediately.
Because underneath the software, algorithms and terminology, we’re still doing what people like Grandpa have always done.
We’re trying to make something useful and convince somebody it’s worth paying for.
The tools changed.
The storefront changed.
The reach changed.
The opportunity changed.
The hustle didn’t.
And maybe that’s why, all these years later, when I think about entrepreneurship, I don’t picture Silicon Valley.
I picture a Western Auto store in Nevada, Iowa.
Shelves filled with nuts and bolts.
Customers walking through the door.
And Grandpa Wayne standing behind the counter.
I didn’t know it then.
But class was in session.
For Grandpa Wayne
I dedicated Side Hustle Revolution to my grandfather because the lessons behind the book started long before I ever heard the term “side hustle.”
The book is about finding opportunities in the modern economy, experimenting with ideas and building additional income without pretending there’s a magic button that does the work for you.
Grandpa wouldn’t recognize most of the tools.
I think he’d recognize the idea.
And that’s enough for me.