‘Throw it back’
The title of this column refers to:
The fate of a homerun baseball hit off a St. Louis bat at Wrigley Field;
A fishing trip with HBSDealer’s North Carolina-based Greg Cole; or
HBSDealer’s Throwback Thursday initiative, drawing from our vast archive and treasure chest of industry news and photography.
There is no wrong answer. But if you picked number three, you hit the throwback nail on its retro head.
Before you can reach the end of this column, HBSDealer will launch its Throwback Thursday campaign, celebrating the triumphs, the challenges, the people and brands — both familiar and long forgotten — that played their parts in the four-decade drama since the first issue of National Home Center News (now HBSDealer).
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
Because stacked neatly in the corner of my office here at the new world headquarters of Lebhar-Friedman sits the collected works of all of our writers and reporters throughout the decades.
It is my sincere belief that there is no museum, no library, no institution of higher learning or any kind of institution with a more interesting collection of stories related to the dramatic golden age of home improvement retailing. It is an honor to sit in the same room with these leather-bound classics.
Let’s just open one of our volumes and flip through it to find:
“Lowe’s hits $1 billion in sales at close of fiscal 1982” (From Feb. 14, 1983): The article quotes SVP finance Clayton Griffing on the “psychological” value of crossing the $1 billion sales mark. One wonders what “mind-altering” comparisons Griffing would attach to $52 billion in annual sales.
“Payless Cashways acquires Lumberjack” (Jan. 3, 1983): Here’s an interesting quote: “There’s nothing broken here, so we have nothing to fix.” With compassion, I hide from wide circulation the identity of this perhaps overly complacent executive. (If you really must know, email me.)
“Top chains are emphasizing employee training” (April 11, 1983): This a headline that seems plucked from today’s headlines.
It’s important to note that these three gems from the early 1980s were pulled from the archives at (almost) random from a single volume. Imagine how much fun we’ll have when we spend a few minutes in concerted effort.
I invite you to play along by following us on Facebook and Twitter, and by subscribing to our HBSDealer Daily.