Hardware stores are in a vise

COLUMBIA, S.C. – For three years, Terry Reynolds has watched sales dwindle at his West Columbia, S.C., Ace Hardware store.

And he has mourned as other South Carolina hardware stores have chained their doors for the last time – including three that are closing in the next few weeks in Richland and Lexington.

He doesn’t want to ponder if he’ll be next. Reynolds believes his community needs a local hardware store, even with a Lowe’s or Home Depot within five miles.

Beyond the bolts and brass knobs, the mom-and-pop hardware store sells itself on service and specialty products. It is a place where shoppers can find garden gnomes, garbage disposals and good advice.

“They can come in and say, ‘I woke up this morning and didn’t have water. What’s wrong with my well?’ We’ll kind of walk them through it,” said James Rimer, who owns Blythewood Feed and Hardware in Blythewood, S.C. “That’s something they’re not really going to find somewhere else.”

The local hardware store is a slice of Americana that is fading as large chains have swooped into smaller communities over the past couple of decades and as customers have put their wallets under lock and key in a lasting economic downturn.

“I’ve never seen it this bad sustained for coming up on two years,” said Rimer, who has seen customer spending drop an average of 10 percent this year.

Sales at hardware stores and home centers nationwide were down in 2009 for the first time in recent memory, said Scott Wright, spokesman for the North American Retail Hardware Association, an Indiana-based trade group. At the same time, an estimated 550 hardware stores and home centers closed nationwide between 2005 and 2009.

The ones that survive, he said, carve out a niche as the place to go for advice – and parts – to complete home projects and make emergency repairs, which more customers are attempting to do themselves.

“It’s service and product know-how, whereas they might not be able to get that from the big-box retailers,” Wright said. “When your toilet breaks, you need to fix it. You can’t wait for the economy to improve.”

The economy also took its toll on Tom Neal, 70, who has owned Depot Building Supply in Lexington, S.C., for 32 years with his wife, Gloria, and son and daughter-in-law, Bryan and Gay. The store, a few miles from a cluster of national chains, will close in the next few weeks as he sells off his inventory.

“It was hard enough when the big boxes moved in,” Neal said. “The last two years, it’s been terrible.”

But as some struggling hardware stores close down, others are preparing to fight for customers and their limited dollars.

“Business overall is down. It’s nowhere close to where it was last year or the year before,” said Ronnie Boland, who operates Boland’s True Value Hardware in Chapin, S.C. “We’ve got to find ways of doing business that we haven’t done before.”

Boland recently broke ground on a 20,000-square-foot building that doubles the size of his store and gives him five more acres to display bulkier items such as tree stands for hunting and 20-foot lengths of pipe.

Boland will create a softer hardware store to appeal more to women, who often control the purse strings in a home, research has shown. The store will put an emphasis on home decor, paint and kitchen fixtures.

“It’s got a lot of dream aisles – an opportunity to dream about, ‘How will this look in my house?’ ” he said. “But we’ll still have all the good-old-boy hardware we always had right down to the brass valves and nuts and bolts. In fact, we’ve got more nuts and bolts.

“I think we found a fine line we can survive on,” Boland said.