Hammer Down
Bart Raser looks over the Carr Hardware location on North Street in Pittsfield.
While he admits to practically growing up at the Carr Hardware store in Pittsfield, working beside his father, Marshall, during the summer and school vacations, Bart Raser says he had no real interest in living in the Berkshires or making the family business a career.
That all changed when, while he was working in Boston and studying for his MBA, his father became ill with cancer. Raser came home — meaning to the store on North Street — for what he thought might be several months.
“Instead, I kind of fell in love with it and never left,” he said. “It’s a good business. It’s been fun … and it’s still fun. It’s great when you can wake up and love what you do every day.”
Indeed, working beside his father, who was very active in the business until recently (and until he was in his mid-90s), Raser has helped write the latest chapters in an intriguing story that began almost a century ago when Sam Carr put his name over a hardware store that would soon become, and always has been, an institution as much as a place to buy paint, nails, and, more recently, a leaf blower.
An institution that has not only been part of the fabric of the community — in Pittsfield and now several other cities and towns where it has locations — but a force in those communities, with Raser and many of his employees getting involved on many different levels.
“If it wasn’t for our community, we wouldn’t be here, so we support a ton of organizations, we encourage our people to get involved, and we supply our people with the time, and the money if it’s needed, to get involved.”
“It’s a big part of our culture — we’re a community business,” he said. “If it wasn’t for our community, we wouldn’t be here, so we support a ton of organizations, we encourage our people to get involved, and we supply our people with the time, and the money if it’s needed, to get involved.”
As for the business itself, it has evolved and expanded its reach — moving into equipment rentals and a strong online component, and adding stores across Berkshire County and then beyond, with a location in Avon, Conn.
And there are certainly opportunities for more of this expansion, said Raser, especially as Baby Boomers move into retirement and look to sell some of the remaining small, independent stores still to be found in the region.
Bart Raser and his father, Marshall, have grown Carr Hardware to a six-location chain (and counting) over the past 30 years.
“The challenge in our industry is there’s a lot of folks who own hardware stores who are late in their careers, and their kids have no interest in working the kind of hours that are required in retail today,” he explained. “And the business is not easy — it’s capital-intensive, the margins are tight, the competition is tough … you have to work hard.
“So there are plenty of opportunities today, and there are probably more coming,” he went on, adding that plenty of people are looking for such opportunities. “There are a lot of folks who want to buy these stores.”
With that, Raser — who now has his own children working summers and vacations doing everything from making deliveries to assembling grills — effectively summed up the state of this industry as well as the challenges and opportunities facing this nearly century-old business. For this issue, BusinessWest talked at length with him about all that and much more.
A Lightbulb Went Off
As he walked through the Pittsfield store with BusinessWest, Raser passed a row of snow throwers, an item that was in short supply and very hard to get at the height of the pandemic, but not so much the past few years.
“We have plenty of them … it hasn’t really snowed in two years,” he said with a voice that blended frustration with hard reality and an inability to do anything about it. “Let’s hope that changes this winter.”
Weather is just one of the myriad issues and challenges confronting those in the hardware business, a sector that, like many others in retail, has undergone tremendous change over the past few decades, in everything from the scope and nature of the competition — Sam Carr didn’t have Home Depot, Walmart, or Tractor Supply to contend with — to how business is done and what is sold or rented, from baby chicks in the spring to bounce houses.
“There’s all kinds of competition, and that competition has changed over the years,” he explained. “When I first came back, Sears was the big competitor, and that’s certainly evolved. Meanwhile, online is a huge competitor, Home Depot, Walmart, local chains — Rocky’s and Aubuchon — and the independents; there are several of them in the Berkshires.”
Like all Pittsfield-based businesses, this one had to cope with the downsizing of GE in the early ’90s and the huge impact it had, and still has, on the city’s central business district. And, like all retail businesses, this one faces the challenge of finding enough talent for its stores.
“The challenge in our industry is there’s a lot of folks who own hardware stores who are late in their careers, and their kids have no interest in working the kind of hours that are required in retail today.”
Before getting to all that, let’s go back to the beginning.
Calvin Coolidge was patrolling the White House when Sam Carr, a North Adams native who was working for someone else in the hardware sector, decided to go into business for himself. He started in a storefront just a few blocks down North Street, and eventually moved his venture into what had been a Sears Roebuck location, and before that a car dealership, at 547 North St., and the Carr name has been over the door ever since.
In 1962, Marshall Raser, who was already in the hardware business in Quincy with his brothers, met Sam Carr and decided to expand, if you will, into the Berkshires.
“My dad bought Carr Hardware, his brothers stayed in Quincy, and he ran Carr Hardware; together, they were all partners,” Raser noted, adding that the expansion into other Berkshire-area communities began in the ’80s with locations in Lee and Great Barrington. Eventually, what would become a chain had a presence in North Adams as well, before the venture moved into other area markets.
Including Avon in 2019, a Connecticut expansion that certainly wasn’t planned.
“I went in to buy their fixtures, and I walked out with the keys,” he said, referring to a store that was closing its doors, only to open again with a new name over the door. The search for fixtures was prompted by Carr’s purchase of an independent store in Longmeadow and the need to relocate it to make way for a Big Y expansion, a move that brought the chain to Enfield, Conn., a store that would close after seven years of operation.
Nailing It Down
As he talked about the company’s past expansion efforts — and also what might happen in the future — Raser referenced the attrition rate in this business, which has grown steadily higher over the years, even within his own family; indeed, in addition to the Enfield store, which suffered from a poor location, a store in Great Barrington operated by his cousins eventually failed, to be replaced by one opened by Bart and Marshall Raser.
As part of Carr Hardware’s long tradition of being involved in the community, employees take part in downtown Pittsfield’s annual spring cleanup.
To survive and thrive these days, hardware ventures need several key ingredients, he said, starting with size. Indeed, chains have an enormous advantage over single, standalone stores when it comes to buying power and economies of scale, Raser said, adding that this is one reason why he is continually looking for expansion opportunities.
Meanwhile, a diverse portfolio of products and services is another must, he noted, adding that the company’s equipment- and event-rental business is a good example of such diversity.
“Rental is an important part of our business now,” he said. “If you had told my dad or Sam Carr that we would be renting bounce houses and cotton-candy machines, they’d think we were crazy, but it’s a great part of our business.”
The same can be said for small-engine repair and even the sale of chickens, which started in three of the stores several years ago and remains brisk.
Meanwhile, a large, effective online presence is also a must, and Carr has achieved that as well.
“It’s such a small part of our total volume, but it’s such a fast-growing piece; it grew by more than 100%,” he explained, adding that, while there’s a large volume of returns, consumers are becoming ever-more comfortable with buying hardware online.
Still, when it comes to most projects and products, consumers still need advice, which is why in-store service from qualified experts is another key to success, and Carr features that as well.
As for size, as he noted earlier, Raser said he’s continually looking for growth opportunities, but they have to make sense, and he isn’t looking to grow just for the sake of growth.
“I’ve walked away from far more than I’ve bought,” he said of stores that come on the market, adding that everything has to be right with an acquisition candidate, from the location to the condition of the store to the price, obviously.
“In many cases, people value their business for more than it’s really worth; with these small businesses, there are emotional connections, and they’re multi-generational,” he noted. “We have a lot of things we look at when considering an acquisition, and the biggest is culture, but the metrics have to make sense as well.
“We’re willing to go where there’s opportunity,” he went on, when asked where the company might go next. “But ideally, we would like to fill in the map; it would be great to have something between Great Barrington and Avon.”
Meanwhile, in the communities where it already has a presence, the company makes getting involved a huge part of its culture.
As Raser noted earlier, this is a top-down proposition. He has served, and continues to serve, on a number of different boards, and the company not only encourages employees at all levels to get involved, it gives them the wherewithal — the time off and whatever else they need — to do so.
“If they’re passionate about being a volunteer firefighter, or they want to coach a soccer team, or get involved in Little League, whatever their passion is, we really encourage them to do that,” he told BusinessWest. “And we’re happy to help them support the organization — that’s our starting point.”
It’s just one of many traditions, carried on for almost 100 years now, that promise to continue for decades to come.
