When René Tummers closes his hardware store at Fairy Meadow, regulars will mourn more than one shop. There's an entire species on the verge of extinction.
Take a walk down Wentworth Street in Port Kembla, and let’s go back in time, down to Gino Chiodo’s hardware store, in the year 1987.
It’s a family affair, with wife Rosa and the younger generation helping out behind the counter and the shelves. Their matching T-shirts proudly proclaim the store’s name, in the kind of typeface you’d only find in 1987.
Previously Dwyer’s, it’s the oldest hardware store in the Illawarra, say those who should know. The Chiodo clan is celebrating its second anniversary there. Gino’s people skills have landed the former electrical engineer in a good spot. Maybe it was meant to be: Chiodo is Italian for “nail”.
If you want to buy one screw, you can buy one screw. Not just a packet.
Look around: there’s modern power tools, fine die-cast wrenches; tools that are an investment. In great wall-cabinets and dusty angle-cut cardboard boxes there are nails, screws, bolts and nuts, sold loose in paper bags. There’s new-technology garden hoses that don’t kink. They even sell a few stove-top espresso percolators, just in from Italy.
The store is open seven days and it’s humming – 100 customers is a good day. Gino stays at the store late, sometimes very late, closing the curtains on the front window and arranging artistic new displays to be unveiled in the morning.
Now 87 and retired to his painting studio, Gino admits he was never particularly handy when it came to fixing things. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t help out a customer with a do-it-yourself job.
“If you want to buy one screw, you can buy one screw – not just a packet,” Gino told Weekender this week.
“My motto was, ‘smile with the service’.
“The best thing was serving the people. We liked the personal service. they come and ask you questions, I’d help with my knowledge, people were happy with that. They buy things, not buy things, doesn’t matter.”
Gino’s did well for 10 years. But as the steelworks cut its workforce, the local economy softened and so too did sales. Local steel fabrication shops which Gino’s store supplied went out of business in the downturn. King St became the main road, bypassing Wentworth St. And down in Warrawong there sprung up a gigantic green box, with a sign that said Bunnings.
Now let’s go north, along Springhill Rd, turning only to get to Fairy Meadow. Along the way we’ll fast-forward to March 2018, and René Tummers is about to close his Hardex store on the Princes Hwy.
After surviving a threatened Masters store down the road, and outliving another major in Corrimal, René has found the new Bunnings at Bellambi has simply sucked his business away – 50 per cent in the first few days, he said. This later adjusted back down but he still estimates a drop of 30-40 per cent. He was never going to fight it – René knows the numbers too well.
If this story opened with a bout of nostalgia, it’s because in the Illawarra, as in many other areas, generations may soon grow up having never known a hardware store that is not Bunnings – the look, the feel and the smell of it. The closure of Hardex leaves Bulli’s Home hardware store as the only non-Bunnings hardware between Unanderra and Helensburgh.
“There used to be one in practically every suburb, where people went and got their lumber, nails, whatever,” René said. “I could probably count eleven hardware stores in the Illawarra that have all closed as a result of this phenomenon, which is big box hardware. You do worry about where it’s going to end up.”
Unanderra’s Hardware Man is still going strong. Further south, there’s a Mitre 10 at Oak Flats, but it will soon have a Bunnings just 100m away in the old Masters store.
In 2018 hardware is not an ordinary market. Any aspirants must share the space with an 800-pound gorilla, one which boasts more than 350 stores and revenue for 2017 of $11.5 billion. The claim is often heard that Bunnings has a 20 per cent share of the hardware market in Australia – but it seems this could only be true if all construction supplies are included, from DIY to building a skyscraper.
In this game, size matters. It allows giants to demand discounting from suppliers in the same way the major supermarkets do – power smaller operators simply cannot wield. Bunnings also manages to get concessions on planning regulations, as happened at Bellambi under the eye of Wollongong City Council.
And with the demise of Masters, Bunnings has even lost its heavyweight competitor – and is completing the sweep by moving into some of Masters’ old stores.
Of course Bunnings (and its parent, Wesfarmers) can’t be blamed for succeeding. Bunnings itself was once a small sawmill, bought by the Bunning brothers in Perth in 1886. Now the chain claims to employ more than 40,000 people in Australia and New Zealand, and says 80 per cent of these are permanents.
People are free to choose where they shop and a great many of them choose Bunnings. It delivers what many want at a price they can handle with a nursery and outdoor section attached. Carrying the company’s logo on your umbrella or your kid’s wrist is entirely commonplace, and then there’s the sausage sizzle, the kids’ playground and the empty cafe.
For many, this is the hardware experience in 2018 Australia. Will Bunnings soon become a metonym for hardware, as Kleenex was for tissues? Perhaps it is already. And while its success is good for those involved, what is the cost?
Let’s go further north, to Lawrence Hargrave Drive in Thirroul. See those hipster cafes, boutiques and trendy active wear stores? That’s where for 60 years you could see people coming and going from Jackson’s hardware store.
This was an old-school operation, where the customer before you will finish his chat before you will get served. A certain kind of manners. Jackson’s was independent in the sense few hardware stores are – having stayed intact through all the name-changes that saw Magnet Mart, Hardwarehouse, BBC and the rest come, and go.
Owner Ron Farrington had conceded he was unable to compete with Bunnings on the sheer range of products, so had to compete on personal service instead. And after 40 years working there, he decided it was “time” for something else. The building was sold and Mr Farrington and his family moved on; lifestyle stores moved in.
Perhaps its distance from Wollongong – until last October, the site of the closest Bunnings – helped Jackson’s stick around so long. And perhaps Home at Bulli may benefit from being just a little bit further north.
We’ll see. The cities and suburbs that we, through our consumption choices, are helping to build, are ridding themselves of hardware stores. These become warehouses, where the customer does the work, in industrial parks on the margins of town, where all essential items seem to congregate, leaving the main streets for “discretionary spending” and cafes.
No hardware stores has a divine right to succeed. And some owners aren’t people people. But they know their stuff, and they won’t stop looking until they find you an answer. If their days are in fact numbered, we may not yet realise the size of hole they will leave in our towns.
Postscript: Agro, the talking cockatoo at Hardex Fairy Meadow, famous for disturbing some thieves at the store many years ago, has found a new home in a large aviary at a school in the Blue Mountains.
