What You Want Before You Know You Want It

Despite high labor and inventory costs, a small hardware store has been in the black for decades. Here's why.

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Best Hometown Business

Staggering labor costs and mountains of inventory let Harvey's Hardware grant every customer's wish. Is this any way to make money?

The first time I walked into Harvey's Hardware, my immediate impression was of having stumbled onto a crime scene. There were no chalk bodies or signs of a struggle, but in every direction I looked in the somewhat claustrophobically arranged, modest-sized store, people were scurrying around, intercepting and closely questioning other people. Often the interrogees were led off to dark corners of the store, where I lost sight of them. And though no one looked frightened or even unhappy, there was an intensity in these transactions that I couldn't square with buying drill bits or wood putty.

Even odder was that five feet from the entrance, an impromptu police-style lineup seemed to have taken shape for my benefit. Five men ranging in age from about 16 to 70, all dressed neatly in sweaters or flannel shirts, were standing shoulder to shoulder; in the best tradition of lineups, two of them looked very much alike. All five were staring straight at me, as if they had been waiting for me to arrive. As I stood there contemplating evasive routes, the entire line started to undulate in my direction. After a moment one of the men broke out in front. When he reached me, he smiled broadly and said, "Can I help you?"

One and a half hours and nearly $500 later, I walked out of the store, having experienced an adventure--a veritable odyssey of hardware--in the cramped aisles of that place. Though I am no stranger to hardware stores, I bought things I hadn't imagined existed, let alone thought I needed; my eight bags brimmed with swiveling drain-spout extenders, multitipped screwdrivers, and dial-a-pattern lawn sprinklers. I had approximately tripled my understanding of plumbing fixtures, roof-snow-removal strategies, the electromechanics of thermostats, and half a dozen other facets of home-maintenance arcana.

I had been initiated into the cult of Harvey's.

As it turns out, just about anyone in the town of Needham, Mass., as well as a surprisingly large percentage of the population of the surrounding western suburbs of Boston, could have warned me that I was doomed to succumb to the near-supernatural level of service and almost comically extensive inventory at Harvey's. People in these parts often express the sentiment that Harvey's is not merely the best hardware store in the area but that it is--as if they've actually scouted the tool-and-gardening emporia of Buenos Aires and Copenhagen--the best hardware store in the world.

In exchange for the wonderful service and selection at Harvey's, its fans shower it with their business--more than $2.5 million worth last year, compared with a little more than $900,000 for the average U.S. hardware store (excluding large "home centers" like Home Depot), according to the National Retail Hardware Association (NHRA). Which poses an interesting question: How can a business thrive for decades while consistently flouting some of the most sacred rules of retail? Anyone who has ever run a lemonade stand knows the drill: hold labor costs down, keep inventory turning over, and run sales to bring in customers and unload sticky merchandise.

Fortunately for the members of the Katz family, none of them has ever run a lemonade stand.

In 1923 Harvey Katz's grandfather started a hardware store in bustling Revere, Mass., up on Greater Boston's North Shore. By the time Harvey returned from a navy stint in the Korean War, his father had taken over the business, and Harvey went to work for him. Just a few weeks later Harvey was standing around the store, shooting the breeze with one of its suppliers. The supplier mentioned that he had just taken over a paint-and-wallpaper store in Needham, in lieu of the $5,000 the previous owner owed the supplier. Would Harvey want to take the store over for nothing, paying off the debt if he could make a go of it? "Sure," replied Harvey. "Where's Needham?"

Needham was 20 miles southwest, but it might as well have been on another planet. Whereas downtown Revere was a heavily ethnic, noisy urban center studded with tobacco-shops-cum-bookie-joints,

Needham was a sparsely settled, Yankee, mostly affluent enclave of Victorian homes, arranged around a lazy knot of stores that made up the town center. Within a year of taking over the store, Harvey decided he wasn't cut out for the paint-and-wallpaper business; he's a big man, blunt and boisterous, and the task of spending hours discussing rose patterns and shades of turquoise with suburban matrons was not working for him. Hardware, on the other hand--that he could relate to. Thus, Harvey's Hardware was born in 1953. From his new storefront, Harvey could watch the occasional horse-drawn carriage clopping by, as well as keep an eye on the traffic flow in some of the seven other stores that offered hardware in Needham Center.

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David H. Freedman

A Boston-based contributing editor, Freedman is the co-author of A Perfect Mess, which examines the useful role of disorder in daily life, business, and science. His other books include Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines; At Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion (co-authored with Charles C. Mann); and Brainmakers: How Scientists are Moving Beyond Computers to Create a Rival to the Human Brain.

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