None of that matters, though, because you weren't intended to make your own way through Harvey's. "This is not a self-service store," says Gary, Harvey's oldest son, who is now the primary owner and manages the store along with his brother Jeff. "We have people here to help you find what you're looking for."
Gary and Jeff themselves are usually front and center in the customer-assistance gantlet. They are both slim, friendly, all-American, scrubbed-looking men, 41 and 38, respectively. They look so much alike that customers who encounter Gary upstairs and then Jeff downstairs are sometimes convinced someone is trying to make a fool of them. (Gary occasionally takes advantage of the resemblance by actually sneaking down the back staircase to greet a customer he has sent down the front staircase, insisting he is his brother.) Harvey himself, though officially retired, hangs around on most days, looking like a bearish, content Leslie Nielsen, natty in pastel cardigans and gray slacks. "It's his hobby now," explains Jeff.
There are 19 other employees at Harvey's. Even though some are part-time, that's still a lot of help for a store the size of Harvey's. Gary and Jeff hire with the busiest times in mind and don't cut back when things slow down; they kind of like being overstaffed. Turnover is surprisingly low; half the employees have been with the store for more than 5 years. (One of them first applied for a job when he was 6 years old; Gary told him to come back when he was 16, and he did.) Every employee can fix a leaking toilet, cut a perfect pane of glass, or schmooze about lock mechanisms. "I tell the kids I hire they should be paying me for the education we give them," says Gary.
Why make the business dependent on such a large, well-trained--and expensive--staff? Originally, that need fell out of Harvey's decision to stock everything under the sun. He had so much stuff that his choice was either to move into a bigger store and spread everything out or to keep people around to help customers survive the experience.
But over time superb service became the second cornerstone of the business. "When you get to know your customers and build a relationship with them, it creates a sense of loyalty and trust," says Gary. Would you recognize your local hardware-store owner if you ran into him or her on the street? Harvey, Gary, and Jeff can't go anywhere without being hailed. Gary was floating down a canal in Venice, Italy, when someone shouted, "Hey, Harvey's Hardware!" from a restaurant window. I myself spotted him near a lake in New Hampshire.
There are direct payoffs to the service emphasis, too. Gary will ask you how the cordless drill you bought last month is working out--not to make conversation, he explains, but to dig up otherwise unvoiced complaints that he can address, or if the purchase dates back a ways, to perhaps uncover the need for a replacement. (Gary seems to have an eidetic memory when it comes to customer purchases. He remembers one of the items I asked for my first time in the store, one and a half years ago, and claims he'll remember to ask a customer about a grill five years after it was purchased.)
The level of staff service at Harvey's is so high, in fact, that when the store finally computerized itself, three years ago, with a system designed for hardware shops, Gary found that he and his staff didn't even need three-quarters of the features built into the software. Why have a computer tell you when to reorder duct tape when any of the 22 people who work in the store can tell you when you're down to your last few rolls? Some information is still scattered throughout the store in various paper files whose locations are known only to Harvey. Gary and Jeff refer to Harvey's cryptic information-retrieval system as "the HRK" (pronounced "hark"), after his initials. In fact, because Harvey had made a habit of filing (on paper) customer information by phone number rather than by name--he has a poor memory for names but is good with faces--Gary and Jeff paid the software vendor to adapt the system to that filing method. Phone-number-based filing is now a standard feature on the latest release of the software.
How does the burden of maintaining a large, well-trained staff affect the bottom line? Very gently, as it turns out. Though labor costs at Harvey's are high, the outsize revenues captured by the resulting top-drawer service drown those costs out. Annual sales per full-time employee at the average U.S. hardware store are $102,000. At Harvey's, they come out to $228,000.
Harvey's still adheres to the everything-under-the-sun inventory-management philosophy. Residents of the neighboring town of Wellesley who have stubborn hard-water stains in their washing machines can always count on Harvey's for a tube of Rover rust remover. I have bought odd-size halogen bulbs and jumbo S hooks there that I have yet to see in another store--and I checked several. Says Gary, "When someone comes in and finds what they're looking for and tells me they've been to eight other places looking for it, I say to them, 'Maybe you'll come here first next time.' "
Stocking all that stuff remains a challenge, but Harvey's has turned even that to its advantage: the jammed-up feeling communicates the scope of the inventory and creates an ambience compatible with a hardware-buying frenzy. "The trick is to keep everything organized," says Harvey. "Not too neat--but organized." Manufacturers' reps sometimes show up at the store armed with "planograms" that map out the most efficient and effective way to display their merchandise, but they end up walking away, shaking their heads, when they see that Harvey's allots approximately half the minimum space per item that they need to work with. Harvey's packs in $113 worth of inventory per square foot, more than three times the average for hardware stores. Sales per square foot are $503, close to four times the average.
Harvey's doesn't just buy obscure items--it buys them in bulk to save money. When a distributor told Harvey that a manufacturer had stopped making the bulky replacement metal cylinder used to line an obsolete, below-ground garbage-storage bin--a product that in a good year accounted for two dozen sales at Harvey's--Harvey bought everything the distributor had and then tracked down the manufacturer to buy every unit it had lying around. To cope with that sort of glut, Harvey's operates four small warehouses in the area and keeps employees shuttling back and forth. Several garbage-bin liners still hang from the ceiling near the back of the store.
Harvey's has turned even that, the willingness to let quantities of merchandise gather dust, into a service advantage. The store keeps part of its warehouse space filled with items needed for weather emergencies: pumps and hoses for rainstorms, shovels and ice melt for snow, and so forth. Those reserve inventories are never used to fill floor stock; they're left untouched and ready for mobilization should a crisis arise. When the Northeast was pummeled by near-torrential rain last October, leading to widespread flooding, the line of people from Needham and surrounding communities waiting for pumps snaked through the entire store. Every customer got one. No one seemed to know of another store in eastern Massachusetts that hadn't run out of pumps within hours. The local police know that Gary and Jeff don't mind if their home numbers are given out in the middle of the night to a distraught homeowner.
