Nailed by Soft Sales : Retail: Once a revenue powerhouse, Clark Dye Hardware will close next month after half a century in Santa Ana. Family owners blame military spending cuts for steep customer drop.
A lot of the bins and shelves at Clark Dye Hardware are empty these days and the store, long known for its vast and varied offerings, is doing little to restock.
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There are no signs up yet, and the clerks, who now often outnumber customers, don’t volunteer the information. But the famed hardware store, a Mecca for three generations of Southland contractors and do-it-yourselfers, is shutting down.
The store that once did eight to 10 times the business of the typical U.S. hardware store has fallen to a flagging economy, its operators say.
“We are victims of the peace dividend,” says manager David McLaughlin, whose family owns the store. He said the chain of events that led to the demise of Clark Dye Hardware can be traced to 1990, when Orange County’s unemployment began rising in the wake of ongoing defense spending cuts. The decline of downtown Santa Ana, the lengthy Santa Ana Freeway widening project and continuing consumer caution in the wake of the county bankruptcy nearly a year ago made things worse.
The going-out-of-business sale starts Monday, and the last day of business is Dec. 13, three months shy of the store’s 50th anniversary.
Clark Dye Hardware then will join the ranks of about 2,700 independent hardware stores nationwide that have closed since the industry’s heyday in the mid-1980s. Although many blame the industry’s shrinkage on the rise of big home-improvement warehouse stores, McLaughlin says that competition was not a critical factor in the decision to shut the store.
Don and Arlene McLaughlin, who bought the 18,000-square-foot hardware store from its founder and namesake in 1980, have seen customer volume drop from 600 a day to fewer than 200. Sales have plummeted in lock-step, and the staff has dropped from 50 in the late 1980s to just 13.
The store, which once boasted $5 million in annual revenue, is doing about $1 million a year now, and Don McLaughlin, 71, has decided to go while the going is good.
“We wanted to close while there was still enough inventory to cover our obligations,” said David McLaughlin, the couple’s eldest son.
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The closing will mark the end of a historic Orange County business, but the legend is likely to live on long after the aging stucco buildings on Main Street in Santa Ana are gone.
This, after all, is the store that carried 53 types of tape measures, 17 kinds of needle-nose pliers, hundreds of styles of cabinet hinges and drawer pulls and washers for faucets that hadn’t been made in half a century. They still sell square-shank spindles for old-fashioned glass doorknobs.
And they do it in a store that hasn’t been remodeled since opening day.
“I always come here because it has always been the place to go when no one else has what I need,” says Rudy R. Rios, 45, a Santa Ana resident and Clark Dye regular for 40 years. “My dad started bringing me here when I was a little kid,” he recalls. “It hasn’t changed one bit. It saddens me that they are closing. It’s another thing we lose from our past.”
When Clark Dye Hardware was at its peak in the late 1980s, a representative of the California Pacific Hardware Assn. in San Francisco called the store an unmitigated nightmare from a marketing specialist’s point of view.
“It is difficult to shop in, it’s crowded, and it’s hard to find merchandise,” he said. “You have to have an employee walk you through it. It is the opposite of everything we tell most stores to be. But it is successful. It is simply amazing to us. . . .”
Don McLaughlin says there was no mystery: He just kept doing things they way they were done by the store’s founder, who died in 1993 at the age of 89. Even as business started declining, he didn’t make changes.
Actually, he didn’t have much choice.
The store was custom-designed by its founder, the display islands built in as permanent fixtures. Even a small remodeling would have been a gigantically expensive task. Besides, says Arlene McLaughlin, no retail face lift was going to alter the sad fact that the customers were evaporating.
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So Clark Dye Hardware has remained to the end the kind of store that once was part of the hub of every American downtown: a true emporium.
The store has only 7,000 square feet of retail display space but has 11,000 square feet of storage in the attic and basement of the main building and in three outbuildings on the leased property at Main and 2nd streets.
And in the glory days it was the store’s determination to have a little of everything on hand--just in case--that made Clark Dye Hardware the place to go if you needed a pair of tongs ($60) to help lug 50-pound blocks of ice; a $400 ironing board in a concealed wall-mounted cabinet; a $2,500 power saw or a $10 hammer; a $200 pickle jar with sterling silver fittings; a $3,000 gold-plated faucet set for your bathroom, or just a chat with a hardware guy and a nickel washer to fix the wheel on your kid’s wagon.
At Clark Dye Hardware--a pure hardware store with no lumber, garden center or auto parts--you could walk in and buy a $175 chrome-plated shovel for your groundbreaking ceremony. And you could buy it on the spot, not order it and wait a week or two for delivery.
But the store’s stock has dwindled as business has dropped.
Glee Anne Joffries found that out when she stopped by Wednesday morning to buy a drip shield for one of her kitchen stove burners.
“I haven’t been here for at least 15 years,” the Costa Mesa resident said, “but I grew up in the neighborhood and my dad always brought us here. I remember that he said they have everything here, so I drove over.”
The store didn’t have the drip pan she needed, however. “They said there are just too many different sizes to keep in stock,” Joffries said.
“When we had a big base of contractors and others who bought the cream, we could afford to carry all the little things people only rarely wanted,” Don McLaughlin said. “But we couldn’t do that anymore, and now I’m glad. It would be hard to get rid of so much stuff” in a going-out-of-business sale.
Construction contractors historically accounted for a big chunk of the store’s sales, but the building business in the area has been in a severe recession since 1990.
The McLaughlins decided in July to close the store, but began talking about the possibility in 1991.
They called the store’s employees together several weeks ago to tell them about the pending closing. All three of the McLaughlins broke down and cried as they took turns trying to read the statement Don McLaughlin had typed up. “It has been devastating,” he said. “But it is better to go now.”
The decision to close didn’t catch employees by surprise--most who remain have been with the store for years and were aware that business had fallen dramatically.
“When the construction business left Orange County, that was it,” said Gerald Struble, who came to Clark Dye Hardware in 1972 as paint department manager. Struble plans to call it a day when the final “Closed” sign is hung in the window next month. “I’m going to retire. It’s hard to find work at 63,” he said.
David McLaughlin says the loss of longtime workers has been one of the bitter fallouts of Southern California’s long, gloomy economic spell.
“I never realized just how dependent Southern California was on those defense jobs. But the defense industry dismantling has cost a lot of people their jobs, and they stopped buying homes and that crashed the development business. People all over just stopped spending money because they didn’t have it or were afraid they wouldn’t have it much longer,” he said.
The Santa Ana Freeway widening project that closed a section of Main Street for 2 1/2 years also hit hard.
“Traffic is down 60%,” David McLaughlin said. “All the people who used Main to go to and from work and would stop here on their way have found other routes. The Main Street bridge over the freeway reopened a few months ago, but the customers haven’t returned.”
Don McLaughlin also faults the city for “letting the area around here degrade.” Although the Main Street corridor is in a redevelopment zone, city officials have said there isn’t enough money to rehabilitate or replace decrepit properties at the intersection of Main and 1st Street--next to McLaughlin’s store and once the heart of Santa Ana.
Then came the county bankruptcy on Dec. 6, 1994.
“When I heard the news that day, I just hung my head,” David McLaughlin said. “Business just dried up” as many people lost confidence and curtailed spending on all but the essentials, he said.
In 1986, the registers at Clark Dye Hardware rang up 197,600 sales--at an average of $25.30 a pop, generating total revenue of just under $5 million. The same year, according to the National Retail Hardware Assn., the average hardware store in the country had 72,160 sales and revenue of $695,635--an average of $9.64 per customer.
Now, Clark Dye’s customer spending average has fallen to $13.90 and its gross annual sales to about $1 million, while the industry average has risen to $1.2 million in sales, or $11.53 per customer. The Santa Ana store, once the envy of the industry, has become just part of the crowd.
It’s a crowd Don McLaughlin is opting out of.
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Clark Dye Hardware
Founded: 1946 by Clark Dye, a Texas native who moved to Santa Ana in 1945
Location: 210 S. Main St., Santa Ana
Owner: Don McLaughlin, who bought it from Dye in 1980
Retail space: 7,000 square feet
Employees: 13
Source: Times reports; Researched by JOHN O’DELL / Los Angeles Times
Dye in Decline
Once a giant in the independent hardware store industry, 49-year-old Clark Dye Hardware has seen its fortunes fall with Southern California’s economy. In 1986, Clark Dye Hardware outsold the average U.S. hardware store 7 to 1. By last year, its sales had dropped 80% and customer volume declined 64%:
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1986 1994 Average Clark Average % Clark store Dye* store change Dye* Gross sales $695,635 $5,000,000 $1,200,000 72 $1,000,000 Spending per $9.64 $25.30 $11.53 20 $13.90 customer Customer volume 72,160 197,600 104,076 44 72,000
% change Gross sales -80 Spending per -45 customer Customer volume -64
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* Estimate
Sources: National Retail Hardware Assn., Clark Dye Hardware; Researched by JANICE JONES and JOHN O’DELL / Los Angeles Times
