I feel hardware stores went the opposite direction.
They show the popular, common things.
I sort of miss stores before the internet. You would get large stores that carried everything, so if you went there for one thing, you would find all the other stuff in the middle.
For instance, hardware stores before home depot/lowes usually had plumbing for all the homes in town, even the really old ones. Lots more brass than plastic.
Nowadays it's like trying to buy a computer at best buy.
Also in large “Home improvement” stores forget about asking for something non-standard of for any unintended application. For example if you tell an employee that you need “something to hold this part here but cannot be a screw because the back is hidden” they will look at you as if you were speaking in mandalorian.
Most large auto parts stores are the same.
When doing e.g. vehicle mechanics you need like 4 spanners of different shapes and sizes for each nut size, and like 3 different sockets of different lengths and tap width for each nut size.
My wife accuses me of buying slightly different tools for fun (which I do), but, like, you really need those slightly different tools.
I go shopping for, like, a pair of tweezers, and for some reason come out the other end with a kit of 27 different kinds of tweezers for $19.97. And then I stare at them for an hour and tweeze stuff in all the various ways. Then pick one and put it in the desk drawer, and all the others go in a baggie in a box marked "small tools". And every once in a while I think contentedly about how rich I am in tweezers.
My first thought is that this is kind of ridiculous. BUT. I bought a cheap pair of tweezers like 15 years ago and they are fantastic. The amount of flex is perfect. They're easy to use, but you can also apply a fair amount of pressure with them. It's just the one pair, and in a panic after misplacing them for a week I tried to find a back-up pair. Well, now I have a lot of tweezers. Cheap pairs. Expensive pairs. Made in Japan. Made in U.S.A. But still only one good pair. Dammit.
I have a lot of tools, especially specialty tools for electrical, and most of my hand tools are a piece of steel shaped slightly differently. Many variations on pliers, hammer, wrench, screwdriver.
