Hewitt’s
Date: January 1, 2005
Place: Main Street, Templeton, CA
Modus operandi: Tripod, warm coat, hat, gloves, scarf, the whole megillah
Weather: Freezing cold at a time when the streets are deserted
Time: 7:00 am
Gear: Rollei 6003, 40mm Distagon
Medium: Kodak Portra NC160, scanned on a Nikon Coolscan 8000 and processed in Aperture
Me: A pleasant memory of a great place
My age: 53
There’s a class of apologists in the US which thinks that freedom brings with it entitlements. They would have it that great American corporations like WalMart and Home Depot are driving the “….poor small local businessman out of business”. How many times have you heard that tripe? The reality is that you can choose lowest price with useless service, or service at a decent, if not the lowest, price. The latter attributes are found in the local hardware store.
In my case the store is Hewitts, and it’s on the Main Street of the small town of Templeton where I live, in central California. Hewitts employs half a dozen people and has premises some 10,000 square feet in size. WalMart is 2 miles distant to the north, Home Depot three to the south. Hewitts has been around since 1899 and remains vital and prosperous to this day. Far from glitzy inside, Hewitts boasts no superannuated greeters who failed to save for their retirement, no asinine ‘Hi! I’m Joe’ lapel badges. Yet there’s nothing there that you cannot find to fix problems in the home or garden. Why? Because the best thing that Hewitts has to sell is the knowledge base in the heads of the three owners, all in late middle age.
Hewitts, and thousands of businesses like it, make no apologies or excuses for the WalMarts and Home Depots of the world. Rather, they thrive because of them. Why? Simple. It’s called an informed sales force that just happens to own the store. No contest.
Case in point. The other day I was stumped by a plumbing issue – a dripping tap. The clearance to remove the body of the tap was so narrow that even a thin-walled plumber’s socket would not work. So I did the natural thing. I dropped in on Rory at Hewitts and described the issue. “Why not bring in a 5/8 inch hex socket and let me turn the wall thickness down on my lathe?”, Rory suggested. “That should get you in there.” I dropped off the socket and a few hours later got a call asking for the exact machining dimensions I thought might work. A day later, I had the socket and the tap was dismantled for replacement of the faulty O ring which was the cause of the leak.
The fruits of Rory’s labor. Price? My return business.
While at Hewitt’s I bumped into another of the owners, Leonard, and had a nice chat about Churchill and William Manchester’s splendid biographies. (Winston Leonard Spencer Chuchill – his folks liked WSC as much as I do). Leonard graduated as a chemical engineer, is an authority on military history and, like his colleagues, has superb analytical skills he can bring to bear on any home hardware problem. Now let me assure you, you will not find the likes of Leonard or Rory at the big stores. So you make your choice – price or brains.
This snap, taken in brutal cold early on New Year’s Day (that’s 28F/-2C in California-speak for those of you in the mid-west), with no traffic (my tripod was in the middle of the road and I needed the ultrawide lens to make the background recede), is a tribute to small retail businesses everywhere. Long may you prosper.
And yes, a big print of this snap is hanging in Hewitt’s for all to see.