BUSINESS : Overflowing Business : The recent storm clouds have had a silver lining for roofers, contractors and merchants who sell rain gear or repair materials.
John Marcham knew the skies must have opened up with a wallop last week when state emergency crews popped into the Monrovia supply shop he runs in hot pursuit of every rain slicker in stock.
“Customers were lined up to the back,” Marcham said. “It was phenomenal.”
San Gabriel Valley entrepreneurs have been up to their knees in work--and burgeoning sales--to help residents keep dry during the recent storms.
Flush with new customers, some merchants were calling it the boom after the storm, a way to offset some of the red ink they spilled during the region’s lengthy recession.
At Golden West Supply Co., for instance, Marcham figures the store has reaped a 300% sales uptick since the downpours began.
At Arcadia-based J.N. Roofing Co., manager Karen Patin says her company has been logging four times the normal volume of calls from homeowners. Many, she said, owned dwellings damaged in the Northridge earthquake and were frantic to plug freshly discovered holes in their roofs, especially near chimneys.
“We’ve had people saying, ‘It doesn’t matter what it costs. Just come out and fix my roof,”’ Patin said. “It’s been pretty hectic.”
Workers at Musalman Roofing in Covina have been putting in extra hours repairing shingles, installing tarps or doing minor patching, owner Fred Musalman said. He said the torrential rains were a potent wake-up call for people hesitant to open their wallets for a new roof.
“With the economy slow and people unsure if they had $4,000 to $5,000 to invest in a new roof, this (weather) is a decision-maker,” Musalman said. “If you let it go, you can ruin a lot of things.”
Storm-triggered business could translate into tidy profits for the legion of small merchants and contractors dotting the landscape, according to one official.
“It’s probably accurate to say that people who supply plastic, roof repairs, rain gutters and drains are doing OK,” said Jim Hornbuckle, board president of the San Gabriel Valley Commerce and Cities Consortium, a nonprofit organization promoting economic development in the area. “I was in a local hardware store the other day, and I overheard workers saying they had a devil of a time keeping plastic on hand.”
At Royal Carpet Specialists in La Verne, sales the last two weeks outstripped the previous six, said executive Van Alexander. The company restores floor coverings soiled by humans, pets--and yes, floods--using blowers, dehumidifiers and cleaning machines. Lately, they’ve been dispatched to homes and offices from Diamond Bar to Fullerton to deal with water seeping under planters and garages.
“Water has a way of getting through places you wouldn’t expect,” Alexander said. At U-Haul in Pasadena, there was a waiting list for submersible pumps.
Some hardware and home-repair stores have been seeming more like packed department stores around Christmas than magnets for weekend do-it-yourselfers. Inside San Dimas Hardware, customers, many of them from the hillside Via Verde enclave, snapped up every tarp in stock last week, according to the owner. Sales of plastic covering were also skyrocketing at Master’s hardware store in Altadena, where the hillsides denuded by the 1993 fire were considered particularly ripe for mudslides.
During the deluges, Home Depot in Monrovia was also awash in customers hovering around “anything that pertains to rain repair,” store manager Joel Pollock said. On the busiest days, he said, the retailer might have hawked 1,000 tarps and entire pallets of roof cement.
“Stores are especially packed when there is a crisis, and we have flooding everywhere,” he said. “Business is probably higher than after the earthquake.”
