Daniel naps through his shifts. He drops his food where he likes. Someone else tidies up. Nobody at Shoppers True Value Hardware in South Portland, Maine, minds. Daniel is a cat, and people make the trip just for him. Few of them leave without buying something.
The store's owners, a father and daughter, cut him slack for a reason. Daniel sells. The store now prints Daniel stickers. One says, “I enjoy romantic walks to the hardware store to see Daniel.” In 2023 the manager posted a joke TikTok naming Daniel Employee of the Month. An animal website reposted it, and it got almost 67,000 views on Instagram. Daniel still earns his keep the old way, too. When he kills a mouse, he leaves the head somewhere in the store.
Dwell time
At Country Ace Hardware in Granby, Colo., owner Amy Kaplanis puts a number on it. Dwell time, the minutes a shopper spends inside, has gone up. People come for the cats and leave with a purchase. Her cat Morris was once named Best Shop Cat in Grand County. In 2022 he vanished. Security footage showed a couple scooping him up from a nearby parking lot. Police traced their plate to Denver and drove about four hours round-trip to bring him home. The couple said they thought he was a stray. The mayor made Sept. 14 Morris the Cat Day. Morris went missing again in 2024 and hasn't been found. A shelter cat named Purdy now works the store with Sheba.
Aubuchon Ace Hardware has turned this into a system. It's the country's oldest family-owned hardware chain, with nearly 150 stores and more than 100 cats. The marketing manager is the founder's great-grandson. Headquarters wrote a playbook for store cats, down to the brand of food. Last year the company printed a Hardware Store Cat Calendar. It raised more than $36,000 for the company's foundation, which gives to shelters and rescue groups. Customers wanted their own local cats, so four regional versions of the 2027 calendar went to print. Oreo, the cat at the Ayer, Mass., store, is May. She retired last August after 10 years. The store threw her a party with a petting zoo and an ice-cream truck. Shoppers who spent $40 or more got a $10-off coupon with her face on it. When it ended, a customer who had just lost her own cat took Oreo home.
Our read
This is a Behavioral story, and a small-business one. A study in the Journal of Advertising Research last year found people would spend more on products pitched by animals than by humans. Testers said the animals had no hidden agenda. That's the whole lesson. The cheapest marketing a shop can buy is the thing that's real. A cat asleep in the seed bags isn't a campaign. It's the store being itself, and people pay for that with their time, then their money.
Here's the part for a family that owns a business. Daniel is a brand asset nobody can replace. In most small shops, so is the owner. Aubuchon's marketing manager is the founder's great-grandson, and a chain doesn't reach a fourth generation by luck. If your family runs a business, pull out two documents this week. The buy-sell agreement, which says who buys the business if an owner dies or leaves, and at what price. And the key-person life policy, which is insurance on the one person the business can't run without. Read who's named, and whether the number still fits the business as it is today. If there isn't one, that's the finding. A good business plans for the day the cat retires, and for the day the owner does. If you'd like a second set of eyes on that paperwork, it's a short conversation.