Hardware Seller Sizes Up a New Rival: Wal-Mart
Construction is done. The parking lot is striped. Traffic lights are in place. A median has been built. Palm trees have been planted on it.
The monster is ready to strike.
Mark Schulein has been waiting all year for the moment. He’s a 32-year-old with what seems to be a good sense of humor and irony--both of which he figures to need in the year ahead.
The man also is good with a metaphor.
“It’s another ogre,” he says with a resigned grin. “There are so many ogres out there, but this is the biggest retailer in the world. I don’t need their shadow. It’s one more shadow I don’t need.”
He’s talking about the new Wal-Mart set to open Jan. 23 in Huntington Beach. Neither public protest nor Planning Commission opposition could keep the City Council, then Huntington Beach voters from giving the green light to the Arkansas-based chain that has a history of devouring competitors with low prices and a one-stop-shopping philosophy.
Schulein knows the history well, because he’s the president of a family-owned string of Crown Ace Hardware stores in Orange County. One of them now sits at a corner of Magnolia and Adams in Huntington Beach, less than three miles from the new Wal-Mart.
Yes, Schulein can feel the predator’s breath from there.
He had written three years ago to alert me to the potential havoc Wal-Mart--then just a proposed project--would wreak on neighboring merchants. I set the letter aside and didn’t write about it.
But with Wal-Mart coming to life, I thought a visit to Schulein was in order. If nothing else, I wondered if he still feared the giant.
“We have a healthy level of concern, I think is the way to put it,” he says--pleased, I think, with his use of understatement.
Relaxed and pleasant as we talk, Schulein says of Wal-Mart: “They, without question, will put numerous small businesses out. I won’t be one of them. I hope. I don’t think I will. I really don’t think I’m going to be affected that much, but we will definitely feel it.”
Wal-Mart has heard this before. On many occasions around the country, its proposed arrival in town has scared the locals. Still, the stores attract more than 100 million visitors a week, says corporate spokeswoman Susanne Decker.
“You can look across the U.S., and there are thousands of small communities where Wal-Mart and other competitors coexist,” she says. “We’re coming in for the customer. We feel competition is good and healthy and, in the end, the customer is the one who’s going to benefit from that.”
I seem to remember that story line from “You’ve Got Mail,” in which Tom Hanks’ mega-bookstore forces Meg Ryan’s small-but-homey store to close.
As Hanks told Ryan, it’s nothing personal.
Does Schulein see his store as the little guy? “We are a local convenience hardware store,” he says. “We just happen to be a little bigger than some of the other ones out there. But what we do is a mom-and-pop type operation.”
His family owns 10 hardware stores in Orange County. The Huntington Beach store is 20,000 square feet. The new Wal-Mart will be 136,000 but, obviously, not all featuring hardware supplies.
In the predatory world of business, Schulein concedes that everyone--at some level--wants to eat the other guy’s lunch. Predators can become prey. Schulein’s family stores may well have chewed up someone along the way too.
“I’m in business to make money; they’re in business to make money,” he says of Wal-Mart. “They have their ways to do it. And they make a lot more money than we do.”
Schulein surely has had time to prepare for Wal-Mart. He has some new plans for his store, but with Wal-Mart traditionally undercutting competitors’ pricing, there’s only so much that can be done.
Schulein knows that too.
Before leaving his office, I needle him a bit and ask if he makes a point of driving by the new Wal-Mart store, just to see how nice it looks.
“To be honest,” he says, with appropriate wryness, “I try to go by as little as possible.”
*
Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.
