Nichols Hardware In Purcellville Still Raking Them In

Big-Box Retailers Can't Match Appeal Of Old-Time Store Brimming With Items

By M.J. McAteer

Sunday, September 29, 2002

"This is not my forte," said Betty Genter, gesturing toward the door of Nichols Hardware, from which she had just emerged in downtown Purcellville, cradling a paper sack containing sanding masks and a floor leveler. "My husband sent me."

Genter, a recently arrived resident of the neighboring hamlet of Round Hill, had been dispatched to Nichols with a list of purchases for a home improvement project. Her mission: strictly gofer.

But the clerk at Nichols had looked over her husband's demands and shaken his head.

"They told me why I couldn't use what my husband sent me for," Genter said, allowing herself a small cat smile. "They said, 'I'll tell you what tools will make that easier.' I told them, 'Don't ever leave.' "

Nichols doesn't intend to. It has spent 88 years doing business by defying conventional wisdom and not changing with the times, even though change is about the only constant these days in the once rural west of Loudoun County. Eighty-four percent of residents have moved into the county since 1995.

Around Purcellville (population 3,584 in the last census), that means that bulldozers are challenging the John Deere as the heavy machinery of choice, and five-bedroom houses sprout like weeds in fields knee-high in soy beans just a summer ago. Purcellville may still be a one-traffic-light town (not counting the blinker), but 20-minute backups have become routine at that light when school buses roll, and the winning politicians campaigned in the last election on slow growth.

Amid this, Nichols remains a stolid, solid presence housed in the same location in which Edward E. Nichols Sr. and a partner started selling Christmas toys and hardware in 1914. Entering the yellow, wooden store on 21st Street, with its stained board floors, dusky aisles, massive wooden cabinets and penny gum machine evokes that kinder, gentler America of lore.

"I brought my mother-in-law and father-in-law here," said the middle-aged Genter, as though the hardware store were a tourist attraction. "They said it was like when they were young."

But the store doesn't trade on nostalgia alone.

"Have you been to Nichols?" people ask by way of answer when a new neighbor wonders where to find screws to hold the mirror on a 50-year-old bureau. A chain store didn't have the hard-to-find item. At Nichols, pay dirt.

Up the cement stairs, on the other side of a heavy, old door, is a world apart from big-box shopping. At Nichols, three or four men in the unofficial store uniform of plaid flannel shirt and jeans take an approach to customer relations that revives use of the word "help" as a synonym for "clerk."

A laconic Jerry Lickey listened without comment to the tale of the screw. After 28 years at the store, he knows the nuts and bolts of his business. He plucked the sample from the customer's outstretched palm and headed for the back room, where a little rummaging through tiny boxes produced its match. Then back to the scarred wooden counter that runs most of the length of the main room to find a pencil and receipt pad to write up the 34-cent purchase.

"Does anywhere around here sell box springs?" the customer asked as Lickey figured in the tax. The pencil stopped moving. Lickey paused for a beat, then extended an index finger toward the high tin ceiling. "Upstairs."

Nichols, like 7-Eleven, carries a little bit of a lot of things, much of it hardly classifiable as hardware. Sure, the handy can find glue by the gallon and chain by the foot. But for the one-stop shopper, Nichols also offers Louisville sluggers, porch swings and Scottie dog doorstops, welcome mats, wooden clothes racks, wool hats, wooble wedges, window shades, weather vanes, wind chimes and a Radio Flyer red wagon.

Need a baby seat, blender or bogus electric fire? Burpee's lima bean seeds, a rollaway bed or Bowie knife? Camouflage pants or a cedar chest? How about a halter for your horse or bike for the Beaver?

"If we've ever needed anything, they've had it, or they can put it together," said Jami Dittmeier, who runs the Salvation Christian Shop in Purcellville. She has come to Nichols for a flag, surge protector and paraphernalia to fix a lamp.

"When I need something for my house that was made 30 years ago, lo and behold, they have it. They always have exactly what I want," said Charles Carlson, 93, of Round Hill, who admitted that on this particular day, he was shopping only for conversation. "I've known Ed Nichols Jr. for a long, long time," he said.

Ed wasn't in, being 80-odd now and mostly retired, but his brother Ken, 72, was where he can be found most days, in a fusty loft tucked above a back corner of the store. The office barely has room for two chairs, one with sprung springs, and a roll-top desk pocked with enough pigeon holes to house a small flock.

In the store's lifetime, the desk has never been moved and never been refinished. It is still streaked with smoke damage from the fire of 1940, in which most of the store's contents crashed into the cellar when the floors burned away. Nichols did business from a back room until the store could be restored.

Handwritten receipts litter the floor of Nichols's cramped aerie, and the shelves are lined with ledgers. No software in this hardware store: All bookkeeping is done by hand, including keeping track of regular customers' tabs. One bookkeeper has been with Nichols for 50 years, but even she postdates the last update in accounting procedures, which took place sometime in the '40s.

The cash register used until 15 years ago was "outdated in 1929," Nichols said, leaning back in his chair. Like his employees, he favors flannel and denim. The replacement cash register, he acknowledged, is hardly cutting edge either.

Computerizing "is a job I haven't been willing to attack," Nichols said sheepishly. "No doubt it will happen. I'm expecting my grandson to teach me. He's 9 years old."

Ken and his two brothers, Milton and Ed Jr., inherited the hardware store from their father. In the mid-'50s, Milton took himself across the street to open Nichols Appliances, now run by his son Bob.

Ed Jr.'s son Ted handles furniture inventory for the hardware store, mostly located upstairs, accessed via a staircase with a pronounced fun house slant. Ted also brought in the Tom Seeley line of handcrafted solid oak and cherry furniture, made by the Amish and finished in Berkeley Springs, W.Va. It sells quite well from a room downstairs.

"We use every inch of the store," Nichols said, waving a hand toward the heavily laden room below, where even air space is taken up by birdhouses and wash tubs and vegetable baskets hanging from the high tin ceilings.

"We listen to what the customers ask for," Nichols said, "and if we don't have it, I tell them, we'll have it next week."

What the customer asks for has changed dramatically in the past decade. No more requests for horse collars or plows, although Nichols stocked them long past their time. Ed Jr., his brother said confidentially, "just couldn't accept that the horse was going out."

Now customers want grass seed and mulch and pruners for their five-acre farmettes or houses on acre lots in developments with unabashed names such as Brown's Farm. Nichols has all of that plus obscure and old items, like the screws for the bureau mirror.

"We're still selling stuff we sold years and years ago," Nichols said.

That inventory has been a factor in the family business surviving the opening of the now-defunct Hechinger's, then Home Depot, in Leesburg about 10 miles away. Home Depot actually refers customers to Nichols for items too old or too low volume for it to stock.

Of course, shopping at Home Depot probably does make a dime's worth of difference in the bottom line, although Nichols said his prices "are not that far out." But value isn't always strictly calculated in dollars and cents.

Take the box spring. Nichols had it on sale, so it was competitively priced compared with Mattress Discounter. Nichols offered free delivery, even to Carole Schmidt, who lives near Seven Corners, about 50 miles from Purcellville, but couldn't resist a sale.

And Nichols didn't schedule the truck to arrive at her apartment between noon and 5 next Wednesday with the call coming at 4:15 -- sorry, not today after all, when she had stayed home all afternoon.

No, Schmidt was asked when she would like delivery. Surprised, she ventured that lunchtime would be good, so she wouldn't have to take off work. The Nichols men arrived at her apartment building at noon on the appointed day, put the box spring and mattress on the bed frame and took away the old ones. The local customer got same-day delivery.

"We take a personal interest in the customer's needs," Nichols said. "We are willing to wait on them, and that goes a long way." Nichols's shoppers, both first-time and old-time, routinely express gratitude and devotion to the store whose owner makes "a determined effort to treat them honestly and fairly."

So big and small farmers alike who find themselves in the Purcellville neighborhood and wondering where to find a plastic great-horned owl with a rotating head to fake out the crows that are after the garden, should expect to be asked:

"Have you been to Nichols?"

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