BRATTLEBORO-Brown and Roberts Hardware on Main Street has sold the nuts and bolts of life for more than a century. So when the Aubuchon chain announced it was acquiring the business and six other locally owned Vermont stores in 2024, the news gave shoppers pause.
Make that paws.
“Please welcome our newest employees!” reads an entrance sign featuring a photo of two black cats. “Keep them safe and shut the door.”
Makita and Milwaukee — named after popular brands of power tools — can’t run the registers, recommend paint, or restock brushes, light bulbs, or batteries. But they nonetheless help the Brattleboro landmark and nearly 30 other Vermont locations purr along, according to Ben Aubuchon, fourth-generation marketing manager of the nation’s oldest and largest family-owned hardware chain.
The company introduced its first cats decades ago to scare off mice drawn by the sale of animal feed.
“We found that just the smell of a cat would typically be enough to keep mice away,” Aubuchon says.
Conversely, the felines attracted customers, spurring the chain to adopt more of them.
At Manchester’s Aubuchon Hardware, for example, shoppers gravitate to its mattress-like stack of charcoal bags less for the product and more for a peek at Delilah napping atop like “The Princess and the Pea.”
“The majority of our cats now are more mascots than rodent control,” Aubuchon says of the more than 100 at its 132 U.S. stores.
Although the cats differ in size, color and age, most were rescued from local animal shelters.
“The cats we get often have extra toes or some sort of what people might call a defect,” Aubuchon says.
But that hasn’t stopped them from clawing their way into the company’s social media — photos appear weekly with the hashtag #storecatsunday — and the first Hardware Store Cat Calendar, a fundraiser for the nonprofit Aubuchon Foundation that supports community causes.
Flip through the 2026 edition and you’ll find Delilah amid the aisles in March, Grant from Burlington’s Bibens Ace Hardware checking out color samples in April, Aggie from Jeffersonville’s Aubuchon Hardware on the computer (literally) in June, Moma from Bristol’s Martin’s Hardware and Building Supply sleeping on a shelf in August and Bubbles from Vergennes’ Aubuchon Ace Hardware alongside fall gardening fixtures in October.
The marketing manager is diplomatic when asked why all of Vermont’s store cats aren’t pictured.
“We didn’t pick cats thinking one’s better than the other,” he says. “We said, ‘If you want your cat to be featured, you need to send us a high-resolution photo,’ and we ended up with only a handful.”
That’s why the Brown and Roberts cats aren’t included — although their absence didn’t stop locals from buying up all the calendars there.
The Jeffersonville store, for its part, still has a stack of unsold copies, even though its feline is featured. A clerk has a simple explanation why locals aren’t taking home the pictorial.
“You can come in and pet the cat in person.”
This News item by Kevin O'Connor originally appeared in VTDigger and was republished in The Commons with permission.