Dealer Profile

You can take the kid out of Buffalo, but you can’t take Buffalo out of the kid.

When Petersburg Hardware held a Grand Opening for its new location in 2016, 2,000 people lined up at the doors.

When Petersburg Hardware held a Grand Opening for its new location in 2016, 2,000 people lined up at the doors... not bad for a town of 2,500 in the middle of nowhere, Indiana.
It’s a far cry—and a far distance—from Indianapolis, which owners Dennis and Sherry Bishop were looking to leave in order to raise their kids in a less-hectic environment.

Al Gemmen might be a little surprised—and maybe more than a little startled—had he lived to learn that the store he founded in Hudsonville, Mi., in 1955 would, 65 year later, be named one of the “coolest” in Ace Hardware Corp.’s vast family.

Nobody thought about lumber in the beginning. Back in 1940, Herman Albrecht Jr., a vocational school shop instructor, used his backyard garage as a workshop for woodworking commissions from friends and neighbors.

It's perhaps an  unlikely place for $4-billion-a-year co-op Do it Best Corp. to unveil the prototype for its compelling new store design program: small-town Vassar, a dot on the mitten-shaped map of Michigan, nestled in the fold where the thumb meets the hand.

As a little kid, Richard Hobbs had big plans. “When I grow up, I want to be a Senator,” he told his mother. As second-generation co-owner with her husband of Simonson Lumber, today headquartered in St. Cloud, Mn., she delivered the verbal equivalent of a slap up the head: “So everything Grandpa Nels worked for would be wasted?”

The light bulb moment occurred when Mike Friedman ran out of space. Mike had launched a home-repair business in Portland, Me., in 2005, which, as he reports, “grew-grew-grew.

All of those self-help gurus advise us strivers to learn a new word a day. Well, today is Monday, and my new word is Kentuckiana. It’s the location of PC Home Center, based in New Albany, In.—right across the Ohio River from Louisville, Ky. (Get it?) “I can look out my window and see the city skyline right now,” declares owner David Stemler.