Fifty years on the same counter — Peat's, 1976 to 2026
Fifty years is a long time for any business. For a family-run office-equipment shop in a country town — one that has had to reinvent what it sells roughly every decade since — it's something close to a small miracle. This is the story of how Peat's got from a desktop calculator on a counter in 1976 to monitoring more than a thousand computers across the mid-Murray today, and the people who carried it the whole way.
1976 — a man and a calculator
Peat's Office Equipment was started in Echuca in May 1976 by Ken Peat, for the most practical reason imaginable: there was no office-equipment supplier in the district, and local businesses needed one. Ken began by selling desktop calculators — genuinely cutting-edge office technology at the time — and ran the shop himself for the next thirty years.
He built it on two rules he never bent, and that the business still quotes to this day. They sound simple. Living up to them for half a century is the hard part.
“Service what we sell. People matter most.”
The range grew with the district. Calculators made way for photocopiers and the first service contracts; then came the area's first business computers, point-of-sale systems and networks. Whatever the new machine was, the promise behind it didn't change: if Peat's sold it to you, Peat's would come and fix it.
That service reputation travelled. As an authorised Canon and Konica service agent, Peat's earned a name across the north of the state for turning up and fixing things properly — and in time the shop even featured in the Canon Dealer of the Year awards, rare company for a business its size.
2006 — the keys change hands
After three decades at the helm, in 2006 Ken sold Peat's to four of his long-serving staff — among them today's directors, Rod Pearl and Brenton Wagner. It would have been easy to sell to an out-of-town chain. Instead the shop stayed exactly what it had always been: locally owned, run by people who'd already spent years behind its counter and knew its customers by name.
Around the same time Peat's joined the Office National independent dealer group — national buying power and brand strength, with the manners and accountability of a local. Brenton had started at Peat's straight out of school, running cable and setting up point-of-sale before working his way up to Service Manager; Rod had come across from managing the finances at a local club. Between them they kept Ken's two rules front and centre.
From boxes on a shelf to systems in the cloud
The next reinvention was the biggest. As the 2010s wore on, 'computers' stopped being something you bought once and became something that needed watching, patching and protecting every single day. Peat's moved with it. By 2017 the shop was running remote monitoring, one-click remote support and a properly professional help desk. By 2022 it had an in-house software team and a full Managed Service Provider offering — cloud, Microsoft 365, cyber security, and custom platforms built for district businesses.
“The machines kept changing. The counter didn't — and neither did the idea that a real person should answer when you ring.”
Somewhere in those years the shop moved up the road from 200 Pakenham Street to 98 Annesley Street, where it sits today — bigger premises, same family-run feel, same names above the door.
Fifty years on
Today Peat's keeps watch over more than 1,175 devices across the district, supports dozens of local businesses on managed agreements, services hundreds of photocopiers, builds software that runs transport yards and clubs, and still sells a ream of paper to whoever walks in the door. The technology would be unrecognisable to the bloke selling calculators in 1976. The way it's done would be completely familiar to him.
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Buy local, employ local, service within 200 kilometres of Echuca, answer the phone, and turn up. That was the deal in 1976 and it's the deal now. Thank you to the district that's kept a local shop going for fifty years — to every business, club and household that chose the people up the road. Here's to the next chapter.
