Local chain of hardware stores, both retail and wholesale (or the wholesale somehow operated as retail, or they had both kinds of shops, still unclear). Anything from hammer and nails, plumbing, electricity, gas, tools and gear, up to stills to make brandy.
It was a member of stour. There were still some vestiges of it in 1999. when I went there to get some proof that I once worked at stour, which was by then dissolved. Vanished itself a couple of years later, the remaining stores taken by their workers and now operating as private businesses.
They were notorious for doctoring the numbers - they had me print the running total on the bottom of each page on some reports, then they'd just tear it at the page where they liked the total and announced that was it. Actually, the final amount was better, but they didn't believe it would be, so didn't even bother looking at the last page. OTOH, while working on that report I checked one of the worse cases where hey lost money while increasing the retail price - which should be impossible - and had there, black on white, proof that some store chief sold a rakija still for 18 of something at the time when it already cost 32. Nothing happened to the perpetrators, even though the paper trail was available and regularly filed, with all the signatures etc.
Somehow their most prominent shop was „Klasje“ (ears), which I didn't understand as a word for many a year, and then later couldn't understand how could it slip by them to have such a poetic and agricultural name for a shop which sells hammers, nails, shovels and vises.
[ears of wheat, that is; the actual plural should be 'klasovi' but this is the older poetic form of it]
21-XI-2019 - 17-I-2026