A Nuts and Bolts Approach
The little man stands there with the shovel from hell, the spade seemingly used to unearth a thousand graves, dig too many ditches--its wobbly handle badly taped, its metal edge jagged, rusted and harelip curled.
He shoots a dead-serious stare at Tom Baumgartner, the floor manager at B & B Hardware, this tough customer with his dirty blond hair, dust caked in the squint cracks around his eyes and a tan that suggests years of hard work under an unforgiving sun.
“I want a new one,” he says with prison curtness, motioning toward the tool. “This one here’s got a lifetime guarantee.”
Baumgartner glances from that weathered face to the hapless shovel and back again. This isn’t just any sorry spade. It’s a Seymour fiberglass-handled special. With a lifetime, last-shovel-you’ll-ever-buy guarantee.
“Give him another one,” he grunts to a manager.
Moments later, holding his new tool over his head as he stomps from the store, the workman is jazzed: “Man,” he says, “I never thought I’d get a new shovel! Woo-hoo!”
Call it just one strange, lightning-fast encounter in the daily tool-selling madness at B & B Hardware, the half-century-old, misshapen little do-it-yourselfer’s haven on the border of West Los Angeles and Culver City.
For its customers, the venerable family owned enterprise with the narrow passages and mad-scientist’s-laboratory cluttered shelves seems a throwback to an earlier era of no-nonsense good service and one-stop, you want it, we’ve got it completeness.
To witness a day in the life of this place, drenched with the scent of strong cologne, is to explore a second home to local contractors, professional fix-it people, weekend repair warriors and confused novices.
B & B welcomes them all with open tattooed arms.
*
On this Tuesday morning, just like all the others, Baumgartner opens his doors at 8 a.m., rolling out display racks for such hardware essentials as garden tools, work gloves, industrial-size step stools, even ice cube trays--all under an outdoor wall emblazoned with ads for Milwaukee cordless drills, Makita power tools and various drain care products.
Already, 20 customers wait. Fidgety people in suits and dresses running before-work errands stomp their feet in a line near the door, like the postal worker who lost her office keys the night before and now must copy another set before anyone finds out.
There are workers in blue jeans and work shirts leaning against a nearby wall, drinking coffee served from a portable snack truck. And the contractors who begin each day with a pit stop at B & B, now waiting in their pickups, taking sips from steaming cups, doing job calculations in their heads.
“Mornin’ folks,” Baumgartner says, nodding to several people. “Hey there, Ethel. You back again, Bill?”
Herding inside, customers cluster at the help/return desk. A gray-haired woman is first in line, emptying a package of household fuses onto the counter.
“This is the second time I’ve had to bring these back,” she snaps. “What kind of junk are you people selling? They can’t all be defective, can they?”
Clerk Santos Montellano smiles.
In a time of soulless oversized hardware chains and inexperienced, inattentive clerks, B & B’s staff has been around for an eternity--a crusty collection of hardware veterans who bring a lifetime of nuts-and-bolts experience from other hands-on careers such as sushi chefs, sheet metal workers and aircraft mechanics.
Take Montellano. He’s a former policeman who says he was once shot six times in a bus stop run-in with a gang member, a dutiful son who obeyed his father’s deathbed last wish that he abandon his dangerous cop career and go to work at the local hardware store where the old man had been a regular customer for years.
Compared to chasing carjackers and holdup men for a living, the dour-faced lady with the fuses seems heaven-sent.
“Ma’am,” he says matter-of-factly, “probably the only real defective things you’ll find at B & B are the people who work here.”
Nearby, Baumgartner works the phones, fielding the first of a continual barrage of daily queries. “Do you sell pins for door hinges?” the caller asks. He walks a woman through an appliance check with insider techie-type phrases like “barometer housing,” “thermocouplers” and “pilot generator”--a regular hardware doctor on call.
Now the line at the help desk is five customers deep. One man wants a knob for his kitchen stoves. Another seeks an igniter for his portable gas grill. A woman wants to know where the catches for kitchen cabinets are located.
One by one, Baumgartner and Montellano handle them with years of coolly collected knowledge of how things work. Theirs is a world of hundreds of thousands of knickknacks, whatchamacallits and thingamajigs--smoke alarms, picture hangers, tool pouches, drywall sanders, toilet brushes, vacuum bags, spackling paste, extension cords, pipe joints, sprinkler stands, caulking glue, roofing tar, welding masks, sump pumps, water filters, toilets seats, toolboxes, fluorescent lights, Braille signs, spring hinges, solid brass door knobs, bug foggers and more than 200 sizes of nails.
Each of the 50 salespeople started amid the organized chaos of the store’s 18 aisles, standing among this New York Public Library of mind-boggling handy stuff with the same dumbfounded question: “How am I ever gonna remember all this crap?”
But little by little they learn their way around their cluttered and confined hardware world. Eventually, like Baumgartner, a goateed, 31-year-old former bartender and men’s suit salesman, they are able to tell that man in search of thumb tacks: “They’re halfway down that aisle on the left, shoulder-height, in the blue and gray box.”
*
At a back gate, Billy Keen has his hands full assisting three people at once--while training a new employee.
One man is nervous, snappish. He wants help loading his truck with heavy cans of roofing tar. Keen’s eyes dart between two customers, helpless to assist either just yet.
Just three months ago, the 36-year-old Keen was homeless and is now lark-happy just to have work to support his pregnant wife. Moments later he is yucking it up over a joke about an Irish priest with Lawrence Mendoza, a retired contractor who has frequented B & B for 40 years--and not just because the store gives a 20% discount to contractors and other regulars.
“With these old codgers here, help is easy. All you gotta do is ask for it,” he says.
Better yet, at B & B, he says, you don’t have to buy the whole box: They will sell you a single nail for 2 cents. Same goes for chicken wire or piping. They will cut it to your need and only charge you for what you use.
Said Mendoza: “If it weren’t for the bad jokes, this place would be just about perfect.”
Another regular, Heather Leemon, stops to buy a “No Trespassing” sign.
“I know everybody who works here,” says Leemon, a property manager. “They call me by my first name. It’s nice to be greeted like that when you walk through the front door.”
Over in plumbing, a female customer asks bearded clerk John Shelton what he’s doing for lunch.
“You helped me out so much the other day,” she says, “I just wanted to say thank you.”
Shelton flashes a bashful yet proud smile.
*
B & B has attracted the earnest and off-the-wall since it opened as a tiny paint store in 1948--the brainchild of brothers Saul and Abe Ballonoff.
Over the years, the place grew as the brothers bought out adjacent businesses--from the shoe store to the deli--each time knocking down walls, expanding their stock and reputation.
Today, the uneven floors are a scuffed-up road map of that history: In some spots the tile is green. At others, it’s red and white with the fossilized outlines of old wall studs here and there. On the main customer drags, the concrete is worn down clean through several patch-up paint jobs.
Both Ballonoffs died in 1987 and left B & B to their grandchildren, who still manage the place. The store remains a success, last year doing $10 million in sales, down from the heyday of the 1980s but still enough to shake off the hot breath from the chains and other local competitors.
On a busy day, Baumgartner estimates, between 3,000 and 5,000 people pass through B & B’s doors, and the store keeps more than 6,000 accounts, most of them still active.
Proclaims a now-outdated sign near one entrance: “B & B has been family owned and operated for the past 44 years, and will continue to be family owned for the next 100 years.”
*
Now it’s midafternoon, amid the noon-to-3 p.m. rush when the tool-selling crush hits hardest.
The parade of customers never stops: men in filthy cowboy boots; mothers standing in the middle of aisles, children tugging at their clothes, reading the back label of some paint can; cold-eyed contractors whose arrogance says they know exactly what they’re looking for; and skinny, nervous men with pleading looks, holding some spare part like it came from another planet.
One man in a green work shirt wanders the aisles aimlessly. “There’s so many things. I don’t know where to start,” he says.
As another customer in a “I’d Rather Be Fishing” shirt complains about a long wait, a clerk points to a sign that reads: “Rain or shine, there’s always a line.”
Nearby, veteran clerk Ray Paquin, who has worked every aisle in the place for more than 30 years, shakes his head after assisting a 40-ish woman with advice about one product, only to have her turn around and buy another.
“You have people who listen and those who don’t,” he says with a sigh, “people who will do what they want anyway, even after asking you 100 times how to do things.”
Still, there’s a rare camaraderie among employees and customers at B & B, a back-slapping authentic feeling of friendship, cemented by a weekly employee bowling league, that makes the relatively low pay and 10-hour days somehow more bearable.
“Hey, bro,” Baumgartner cheerily tells one disheveled, tough-as-nails contractor, “you look like a pig today.”
“Hey, man,” the contractor snaps back, “some of us gotta work.”
Later, a woman stops clerk Andrew Balsz: “Young man, I’m looking for somebody.” “Hey, ma’am, aren’t we all?” he answers, straight-faced.
There is a certain edginess to the place. One B & B clerk was fired recently after a customer swore at him and he returned the favor.
“How are you?” a clerk asks one ponytailed man this afternoon. “Oh, fair to miserable,” he replies without a smile.
Baumgartner explains the tension: “People don’t come in here to browse, but because something needs fixing. They have no clue of what’s wrong with the toilet and have tried jiggling the chain and staring into the tank. And now they come here, tense and out of their element.”
And still Baumgartner loves it. He likes helping the fathers who come in with lists for their children’s science projects. He revels, on this night, in helping a woman devise a makeshift chair hanger for her garage, using a few common poles and pipe elbows, saving her $30 from the department store price.
“It’s the heart of retail,” he says. “Somebody comes in with a problem and you help them solve it.”
*
But even B & B Hardware has to shut its doors sometime.
At 6:15 p.m., Baumgartner announces that the store will close in 15 minutes. He looks toward the door, on the lookout for that last straggler to arrive two minutes late, breathless and pleading. (“One woman swore she’d have my baby if I let her copy a key.”)
Sure enough, just as the outdoor racks are pulled in and the doors are locked, a woman leaps frantically from her car, running toward the door.
“You can’t be closed,” she tells old Sam Durley, the veteran security guard. “Do you think they’ll let me in? Oh please, they’ve got to let me in.”
They let her in.
