At Store 20, service trickles down from the top
Weiss Ace Hardware in Glenview, Ill., is also known in Ace circles as store No. 20, which means it is among a select group of stores whose roots go almost as far back as the founding of the Oak Brook, Ill.-based co-op.
The business was opened in Evanston, Ill., in the 1920s by Richard Hesse—one of the founders of Ace Hardware—who sold it to John Weiss and a partner in 1931. It was relocated to Glenview in 1960 and is now run by Weiss’s son, Jon, and two of his children.
“The original store had a little bit of everything, including small appliances like toasters and an assortment of light bulbs,” said Jon Weiss, 73, who left college in 1955 to take over the business shortly after the death of his father. “There was a sliding ladder along the wall, so we could reach the higher merchandise.”
That 2,000-square-foot store, located on Main Street in Evanston, also had a trap door that led to the basement, where lengths of pipe could be slid down and cut to size on an old-fashioned cutting machine. Merchandise orders were hand-written, and the delivery truck came almost every day—whether it was dropping off a large order or a couple of items.
These days, Weiss Ace Hardware sits in a 20,000-square-foot building about a half-mile from downtown Glenview. The store, in its third location since moving from Evanston, has been expanded to include two additional lines of paint (the Ace private-label brand and Benjamin Moore), as well as large selections of lawn and garden products, birdseed and birdfeeders, and hard-to-find humidifier filters. There are also several aisles of outdoor furniture, a broad range of Weber grills, lawn mowers and snow blowers, and a housewares department that takes up 15 percent to 20 percent of the store.
“In fact, a couple of these departments are probably bigger than the entire store my dad had,” Weiss said.
The store footprint has changed dramatically in the company’s 78-year history, but the focus on customer service remains. Weiss Ace Hardware has 30 to 35 employees, depending on the time of year, about a dozen of whom have been with the store for 10 years or more. This group includes a 36-year associate and a cashier who recently retired after 27 years.
Several staff members are retired from other professions, Weiss said, adding, “They are excellent employees who fit right into the tradition of customer service the store is known for in the community.”
It remains, however, a family business, with Weiss’s son, J.T. Weiss, and daughter, Lynne Rine, working full time with their father (Weiss has three other children who are not involved in the business). “We treat ourselves as a family-oriented business, and I think many Ace stores fall into that category, with second and third generation owners,” he said.
Rine, who was in middle school in the 1970s when she started working in the store afternoons and summers, has seen many changes in both her father’s business and the Ace co-op over the last 30 years. The biggest revolution has taken place in the area of technology, she said.
“When I started, we were counting things by hand. We had registers and machines that were eons old and didn’t have the ability to inventory or track items,” Rine said. “Now we’re computerized, which makes doing business a whole lot easier.”
Bill McKay, an employee who has been with Weiss since 1995, started in the hardware business in 1971 at a Waukegan, Ill.-based Ace store—also one of the oldest in the co-op. McKay believes it’s the friendliness among the staff and between the staff and customers that keeps Weiss Ace Hardware successful, despite the fact that both a Lowe’s and Home Depot have opened nearby within the last five years.
“It trickles down from the owner, who works in the store and who can be heard saying good-night to the cashiers before he leaves,” McKay said.
Weiss served on the Ace board of directors from 1990 to 1999. Like just about everyone else who owns a business in the United States, he is dealing with the fallout of the recession. Christmas sales were down and store traffic has suffered, but the tough Midwestern weather helped Weiss sell a lot of weather-related items this winter.
“I guess over the years we’ve heard the hardware store is recession-proof, and I hope that’s true,” he said. “We’ve definitely had our ups and downs recently. You have to watch your costs very carefully.”