Adam's True Value Hardware

On the morning of their grand opening, Chris and Justin Taffera unlocked the front doors of Adam's True Value Hardware in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and welcomed their first customers into a brand-new store stocked from end to end with True Value inventory, fitted out with the chain's latest branding, and ringing up sales on a register that, as far as the True Value network can tell, no other store in the country has running yet. A self-checkout. The brothers had been asking for it since their very first sales call. On opening day it works.

The day before the doors opened, Justin sat down with Rundoo co-founder and CEO Nick Hershey for an episode of his Hammer Or the Nail podcast, walking through how the store came together, the family it is named after, and what the brothers wanted out of the software that would run it.

Justin Taffera interviews Nick Hershey, Rundoo co-founder and CEO, on the Hammer Or the Nail podcast, recorded the day before grand opening at Adam's True Value Hardware in Scranton.

Two brothers, one Sunday dinner

The store is named for Adam, the brothers' late brother, and it carries a family that runs deeper than the storefront. Chris and Justin already owned and ran apartment buildings together, flipped houses together, and were in the habit of talking to each other every day of the week before any of this started. The hardware store began the way a lot of good ideas in their family begin, at Sunday dinner at their mother's house. Chris kept bringing it up. They were spending real money on hardware for their other projects, and he wanted to know why they didn't just own the store they were buying from. A week later Chris was back with numbers, and a week after that the conversation was less about whether and more about where.

Their nephew came in on the project. Their parents came in. Wives, in-laws, the people who built the shelves the night before the soft open. The opening day photo of Adam's is a family photo. The brothers say they have already started talking about the second store, and the third, and how to not handcuff themselves to a single counter while they do it.

A napkin at NRF

When they decided to open the store, the brothers needed a point of sale. True Value gave them a list of the systems most of the network uses. None of them felt right. Chris and Justin asked if they could go look for themselves and ended up at the National Retail Federation show in New York, walking the floor for a piece of software that didn't yet feel obvious. They stopped at a booth and started explaining what they wanted, and the person behind the counter, who worked for a different point of sale company entirely, stopped them mid-sentence.

"You guys want Rundoo."

Rundoo wasn't at the show. The brothers wrote the company name on a napkin, drove back to the hotel, and by Saturday morning they had a call back from the Rundoo team. From Friday's napkin to Saturday's first call to a signed contract was, in the Tafferas' phrase, "a good sign." It was also, as far as anyone at Rundoo can remember, the first time a competitor had referred a customer over from inside its own booth.

The first ask was a register that rings itself up

The very first feature Chris brought up on the very first technical call was self-checkout. The brothers had spent enough time inside chain retail to take it for granted that a register could ring itself up. Rundoo didn't have it. They told the team they wanted it on day one. Nobody promised anything, and they signed anyway, on the strength of what was already in the product and the speed at which the rest of the gap could close.

Their implementation manager came from running a hardware store, so the first weeks of setup were not a translation exercise. Their engineering questions went straight to the engineers who would answer them. The brothers tell a story about flagging an issue with a True Value integration on a Tuesday and finding it shipped before they had finished their second cup of coffee on Wednesday.

"You go on about your day and it's like hours later and you're like, oh my God, it's fixed already."

The self-checkout itself took longer than hours, but by April the station was live on a terminal in the front of the store, ready for the grand opening crowd.

How a hardware store does self-checkout

The station at Adam's is unfussy on purpose. Self-checkout inside Rundoo is a dedicated staff login with three rules baked in:

• New sales only. No returns, no refunds, no exchanges.
• No negative quantities. Nothing leaves inventory through this station.
• Card only. Tap to pay through Stripe, no cash drawer involved.

A customer walks up to the station, scans the items in their basket, taps their card, and walks out with a receipt. The "cashier" never logs out, never asks for a PIN, never waits on a text-message code, and never needs a manager to override anything. It is the kind of station an owner can install behind a single screen and a barcode scanner, and it does exactly one job correctly.

If you are a store owner reading this and thinking, "that is it?", that is the point. Most of what makes self-checkout hard at a hardware store is not the checkout itself, it is the surrounding mess. Returns at the same station, mixed payment types, employee discounts, customer accounts, contractor billing, paint tints that need a price lookup, the lawnmower that needs a key. Strip all of that away from one register, let it do new card sales and nothing else, and you have a station any customer can use without supervision.

Why Adam's is the first to ring one up

True Value's corporate team has been telling anyone who will listen that Adam's is the first store in the network with a self-checkout at the register. For a co-op of thousands of independents, that is a meaningful first. Self-checkout has been standard at big-box retailers for two decades, and operators in independent hardware have been asking the legacy POS vendors to support it for nearly as long. The technology was never the obstacle. The software was.

The Tafferas asked for a feature and we shipped it for them quickly because Rundoo runs entirely in a web browser, on hardware they could buy off the shelf, with a permission system built from day one to let owners define exactly what each staff role can and cannot do. A request like "let me set up a register that only does new card sales" stops being a feature request and starts being a configuration.

The partnership half of the story

When the Tafferas talk about Rundoo, they spend almost as much time on the people as they do on the product. A point of sale is the core software of a store, and the people running the store are inside it for eleven hours a day, every day. The brothers met the salesperson who first called them back on a Saturday, the implementation manager who used to manage a hardware store, the engineers who would later ship their integration tweaks. They flew people out. They picked up the phone. Nick took a red-eye and a five-hour drive to be at the opening.

"Whatever we ask, somebody picks up. The response rate is insane. That's everything we want."

A line like that does not come from a feature list. It comes from a few months of small things landing on time.

What's next at Adam's

Chris and Justin already have a list. A Rundoo-powered e-commerce site for in-store pickup. Contractor pricing on the Rundoo mobile app. Local delivery for customers inside a few miles of the store. Loyalty and gift-card programs through True Value's network, which Rundoo built integrations for earlier this year. And the second store, somewhere in the next eighteen months, with the same family running it and a stamped version of the system they have now.

"If we could go and open up another store, keep Rundoo, keep Dan, our sales rep from True Value, I'm okay."

Adam's is one store. It is also, for the first self-checkout in the True Value network, a useful reminder that the things independents have been told to wait on are mostly things their software has been telling them to wait on.