COUDERSPORT, PA — The Father’s Day display at Lebo’s Hardware on East Second Street is, for the sixth consecutive June, a single Stanley 25-foot tape measure propped against a hand-lettered FOR DAD sign and finished with a length of jute twine that proprietor Wayne Lebo has personally tied, untied, and retied since 2020.
Lebo, 64, says the display reflects what he calls a settled question. The tape measure failed to sell during its initial June 2019 run. It failed again in 2020, when masking tape was applied to the box. It failed in 2021 with the addition of a small American flag, in 2022 with a handwritten note reading GREAT GIFT, and in 2023 with no embellishment at all. “The market has spoken,” Lebo said. “I just keep listening.”
The tape measure itself, a Stanley PowerLock retailing at $14.99, occupies a four-inch square of pegboard otherwise dedicated to drywall anchors. Lebo has not raised the price, which he described as still fair, nor lowered it, which he described as an admission.
Items Lebo considered for the display before settling back on the tape measure include a multi-bit screwdriver, a pair of work gloves in a size most local fathers do not wear, and a stainless thermos that has been at the store since the Bush administration. “The thermos is on its own journey,” Lebo said.
Customer Dale Whitmer, 47, said he came close to purchasing the tape measure in 2022 for his father-in-law before remembering his father-in-law owns six tape measures and considers the seventh “an insult to the first.” Whitmer instead bought a card at the CVS three blocks over — “the one with the dog in glasses” — and reports it has been used three years running, because his father-in-law throws cards out without reading them.
At that same CVS, manager Cheryl Iverson said the Father’s Day aisle has been picked through since June 1, with the remaining selection consisting almost entirely of cards addressed to grandfathers and one card that simply reads “Stepdad — Sort Of.” Iverson declined to comment on the tape measure but acknowledged she has walked past it on her lunch break for several years and assumed it was a fixture, like the bell over the door.
Lebo’s son-in-law, Brent, has on three separate occasions offered to redesign the display using what he called “contemporary retail principles,” including a riser, a spotlight, and a placement of the tape measure beside a flannel shirt. Lebo politely declined each time, citing concerns that a flannel shirt would imply the tape measure was not enough.
Lebo plans to leave the display up through Saturday, after which the tape measure will return to its pegboard square and the twine will go back into the drawer beneath the register, where, he noted, it has been since the year his daughter graduated high school. “She’s got two kids now,” he said. “The twine is fine.”