Industry History | Fastenal — Thirty Thousand Dollars at 69 Lafayette
· 1967-11
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Industry History | Fastenal — Thirty Thousand Dollars at 69 Lafayette
kevin
People treat Fastenal as a Winona campus that always ran industrial vending machines.
The first shop was a 1,000-square-foot fastener counter that had to abandon the machines.
On 28 November 1967 Bob Kierlin opened Fastenal at 69 Lafayette Street in downtown Winona.
He and four friends, Jack Remick, Van McConnon, Steve Slaggie and Mike Gostomski, pooled about $30,000 in 1967 dollars.
Kierlin had wanted, since he was eleven in his father's auto-parts store, a way to sell nuts and bolts without sending a customer to the next town.
The first plan was custom vending machines.
Investors had already said no about thirty times.
Within weeks the machines could not hold the sizes people asked for, so the partners switched to a branch counter.
First-month sales were $157.
December 1967 did $579.
The first full year, 1968, sold about $35,000 of merchandise.
Profit took three years.
McConnon was the only paid hand at the start, at $200 a month.
A second branch opened in Rochester in 1971.
The public listing came in 1987.
The Lafayette storefront was later bought back and fitted as the Fastenal Museum, with a prototype of the unused vending machine inside.
The mechanism that survived is the one the failed machine forced: put a branch where the job is, keep odd sizes in rented garages, and treat the counter as a service desk rather than a catalog.
Photo: Downtown Winona near Lafayette Street, via Wikimedia Commons.
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