Historic hardware store closing on Main Street
PHOTO/EDD Cote
Mark Lannon, a 35-year manager at Elwood Adams Hardware, talks to a customer before the store closed permanently in September.
In today's retail world, a small hardware store has to compete not just with Home Depot and Lowe's Home Improvement but also with Amazon and other online options letting anyone buy nails, light bulbs and screwdrivers without getting off the couch.
So what's a 235-year-old downtown Worcester hardware store to do?
Those converging factors – along with an inconvenient Main Street location – were enough to force Elwood Adams Hardware to close in September, as the latest local example of a widespread retail trend favoring the Amazons and Walmarts much more than even deep-pocketed longtime retailers like Macy's and JCPenney.
“That's changing times,” said Mark Lannon, who's worked at Elwood Adams for his whole 35-year career. “It's inevitable.”
The hardware store has always been at the same location, at 156 Main St., first built by Daniel Waldo, according to the store, which calls itself the oldest business in Worcester and “probably the oldest hardware store in the nation.”
The building, which Lannon said was the city's first brick commercial building, dates to 1830. The shop had several names over the years, but the same one since the late 1800s when it was named after an apprentice who owned it.
Creating a personal connection
Elwood Adams hasn't stayed entirely still. For years, it did make its products available online. But with about 16,000 items for sale, it took so long for Lannon to manually put each product on the website, it became unfeasible, and the store gave up its online efforts.
People looking for the convenience of buying online has never been Elwood Adams's main clientele anyway. There have been cases of people asking for a product, getting a recommendation and writing down a model number – just to end up buying it online. But more often, Lannon said, it has been those looking for a personal connection, or maybe just buying from there because they simply always have.
“We've had guys come in here in their 90s who'd say, 'I used to come in with my grandfather,'” Lannon said.
The weeks leading up to the closing have brought a stream of wellwishers, who recalled long-ago trips to the store or the friendly service and rapport that's not so easy to find at much larger chains — never mind online.
“When I was a little girl, my mom would bring me here all the time,” said Carla Harris, a shopper whose own memories go back to the 1970s and '80s.
Bill Quinn, a maintenance manager at the Worcester Police Department, has been a regular at Elwood Adams for 18 years for the police but far longer himself. He and Fran Neale, a manager and a 41-year employee, reminisced about long-gone Worcester landmarks.
“It's that neighborhood feel,” Quinn said.
Downtown closings
Elwood Adams is one of two Main Street businesses closing this fall, along with Shack's Clothes, a men's clothing store opened in 1928. Shack's Clothes offcials declined to be interviewed.
The hardware store is the latest longtime Worcester business to close in recent years. The Classic Toy Shop on Park Avenue closed in 2015 after 35 years, and the Ben Franklin Bookstore closed in 2011 after 46 years downtown. The automotive business Benson & Wood closed on Park Avenue this summer after 90 years — not because of economic conditions but because its building will soon be sold.
Elwood Adams is closing as the stretch of Main Street around it is being overhauled with new pavement, lighting and trees. A few blocks to the north, the former Worcester County Courthouse is proposed to be renovated into 125 apartments in a $53-million project.
The Cloutier family, the hands-off owners of Elwood Adams, did not want to be quoted for the story, the store's managers said.
Trending in the other direction
The trend isn't unique to mom-and-pop stores, or to Worcester, of course. Credit Suisse projects more than 8,000 retailers will close this year, surpassing even the height of the Great Recession.
Last year, the Retailers Association of Massachusetts saw its largest drop in membership in at least two decades, an indication of how many have closed their doors here.
“This is a scenario that's playing out in every city and town in the commonwealth and to an extent every city and town in the nation,” said Jon Hurst, the association's president.
It's an uphill climb for so many retailers, as sales drop and rents and health insurance premiums rise, Hurst said. Online retailers don't always have to collect sales tax, and don't have to pay time-and-a-half on Sundays and holidays like shops in Massachusetts do.
“Unfortunately,” Hurst said, “it's going in the wrong direction.”
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