CLOSURES MEAN LOSS OF HUMAN CONNECTION
‘It’s a small store. It’s convenient. Excellent service. It’s just like being home. Honestly, I was almost in tears.’
SAN JOSE >> Wednesday morning, Katherine Cree dropped into her neighborhood Orchard Supply Hardware on the edge of downtown San Jose and found what she needed to defog the head lamps of her car: The silicone. The RustOleum 2X gloss. She also found a living, breathing, sales clerk who wasn’t about to run her over in a beeping forklift.
“He read the directions on
the can to me because I don’t have my glasses,” she said.
She was heartbroken when she learned this week that Orchard Supply — a company founded in San Jose in 1931 — would be shutting down all its stores, in California, Portland and Florida, by the end of the year.
“At the big box stores, you’re lost and you have to hunt someone down to help,” said Cree, 60. At Orchard Supply, “it’s a small store. It’s convenient. Excellent service. It’s
just like being home. Honestly, I was almost in tears.”
It’s a sentiment shared by many across the Bay Area, where dozens of Orchard Supply Hardware stores have been neighborhood fixtures for decades. This morning, they’ll start liquidating everything in the stores. Generations of customers shared a collective mourning, not just for the loss of a brick-and-mortar hardware store, but of a human connection in an increasingly
faceless retail world.
I get it.
Since my family moved from the East Bay to San Jose in 1969, Orchard Supply had become a Saturday morning ritual for my dad and me. He had nightmares about labyrinthine plumbing and gushing leaks and could always count on a clerk at Orchard to gently talk him through the latest home repair.
When my husband and I bought a home just five blocks from where I grew up, there was something comforting about going to the very same Orchard Supply on the corner of West San Carlos and Montgomery streets. A few years ago it was shuttered, but not demolished when a new one was built next door.
That’s where I found Cree and her 2X gloss Wednesday morning. At these two stores over the years, I would buy impatiens every spring to bloom beneath my backyard Magnolia tree and tanbark to scatter around the fountain. This is where I carried countless rusted parts and specialty light bulbs looking for replacements. Like my father did with me, my husband would take my daughter or son along, too. The annual calendars featuring trains that they gave away free at checkout would end up under the Christmas tree.
As if I needed more nostalgia, the store continues to carry the candy bars of my childhood in a special display: Charleston Chews, Sugar Babies and Big Hunks.
It didn’t always have what I needed and the prices could be higher than its competitors. And, yes, it’s just a hardware store. But as other landmarks in San Jose are vanishing — Mel Cotton’s Sporting Goods, the domed Century Theaters, Lou’s Village banquet hall, Race Street Fish and Poultry — I find myself wondering: What happens to the character of a city when some of its bedrock businesses disappear?
“I’ve been in a tailspin every since we lost Frontier Village. I’m still coping,” San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said of the Western-style amusement park that closed in 1980. “We do lose a bit of our soul with every one of these homegrown businesses that goes the way of so many victims of the rapidly changing economy. Sadly, this is a narrative playing out along Main Streets in towns throughout the country.”
When I posted the news about Orchard’s going out of business on Facebook, in the comments section, they left crying emojis.
Carlo Mora, 62, has been a customer at the West San Carlos Street store since he was a child. His father and brothers had no experience with home repairs and would rely on the experts in the aisles.
“We needed to ask them how to fix everything,” from electrical to plumbing to doors and windows, he said. “I’m really clumsy at home projects, so I come here.”
Wednesday, Norman Botelho, 96, purchased steel wool to clean his barbecue grill. Stu Ganz bought a hose that won’t kink. Roger Gallagher picked up an aluminum strip and safety glasses. Gratia Rankin came in for Super Glue.
When Gene Casanova came in for “little washers” to fix his faucets, he made a beeline for greenvested Gus Constantine, whom he has been trailing down the aisles for 15 years.
“He knows the place backward and forward,” Casanova said. “He always says, ‘what do you need?’”
Lowe’s Home Improvement, which bought the chain in 2013, said it will try to absorb many of the employees at their bigger stores.
Orchard Supply was never really a mom-andpop business. It was a collective created to help farmers survive The Great Depression in the 1930s. Since the 1980s, it has gone through several corporate owners, including Sears, and a bankruptcy.
But somehow, for the most part, it maintained its folksy, homespun image. Radio commercials in the 2000s, created by Ogilvy and Mather, took direct aim at the big box competitors with a narrator describing being lost for days in one of them.
“Day 12. Today I set up camp in the lawn and garden aisle,” the whispering narrator began. “It was more comfortable than the tubs in the bath section.”
The comical storyline went on until the final pitch: “Don’t get lost in a warehouse.”
Some customers were not just sad at the thought of the chain closing down, but angry, and planned to take it out on Lowe’s.
“I will not shop at Lowe’s,” said Craig Wilson, raising his voice in the parking lot. “They ran this place into the ground.”
But his affection for this place, these employees, was obvious as he turned back to his favorite longtime clerk, who was out front, to say farewell.
“See you later, Gus Gus,” he said.