State of the independents

“Those green trucks, they could be the end of us.” Rick Karp is the second generation of his family to run Cole Hardware, a chain of three small San Francisco stores, and he’s talking about the Amazon trucks seen increasingly, making deliveries around the city. A few years ago, Karp led the charge by the independent hardware stores against the proposal to allow big box hardware stores to breach the city limits. “One is here now,” he says, conspicuously not naming Lowe’s, which has an outlet in the Bayview district. “And their noxious cousins, Target and others — with all their housewares — are now arriving.” By 2012, according to a report by Hardware Retailing magazine, the so-called home centers — led by Home Depot and Lowe’s — and lumberyards had secured an estimated 87 percent of the $292 billion domestic hardware market, leaving the dregs, 13 percent, for traditional hardware stores. To raise their purchasing power, most of the city’s remaining independents have joined distributing cooperatives — the likes of Ace, Do It Better and True Value. But they still don’t have the clout of the megastores. “Where we have to compete is, of course, service, service and more service,” Karp says. Cole recently became the first hardware store to strike a deal with Google to deliver its wares by Google’s competing shopping service. “We’ll see how that goes.” “Some of the greatest independents in the nation are in San Francisco,” Dan Tratensek, Hardware Retailing’s Indianapolis publisher says. “And it’s not all bad news for them. The hardware market in general is growing, at 4 to 6 percent per annum now. Real estate costs and availability in downtown San Francisco might keep some bigger stores out. If they’re careful, if they keep on top of what their customers want, these stores will stick.”