Bigger Floors Followed the Smaller One
The chain grew from a single store to about $2.5 billion in annual sales. It filed for bankruptcy in 1999 after rivals ran the same format on a bigger floor.
A Warehouse Full of Weekend Plans
The store filled the far end of a suburban parking lot, flat-roofed and enormous, with flats of marigolds outside the entrance and the smell of fresh lumber drifting through the loading bay. The concrete floor inside stretched what felt like the length of a city block.
Shopping carts wide enough for a sheet of plywood rolled through aisles stacked with paint cans, hand tools, bags of mulch, and unfinished shelving. Every department had its own territory.
Cash registers lined up at the front like a grocery checkout. Staff in aprons stood by department, ready to walk a customer through a weekend project.
The name on the storefront was Hechinger. In the Washington suburbs it was where a Saturday project began.
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The Project Was the Product
The surface product was lumber, paint, tools, garden supplies, housewares. A homeowner walked in for materials and walked out with the makings of a weekend job.
The company was not selling hardware; it was selling the confidence to attempt the project. Each department was staffed by what the company called a core specialist, often a veteran of the trade. The supermarket layout with wide aisles, shopping carts, and a central checkout made professional-grade materials feel like a grocery run.
Sidney Hechinger started a wrecking and salvage operation in Washington in 1911. The first retail hardware store opened eight years later.
In 1924 the company stopped selling to contractors entirely and focused on the homeowner walking in off the street. The competition was never the other hardware store down the road; it was the contractor's phone number on the refrigerator.
The Homeowner Kept Coming Back
In 1958 the company built its first hardware and lumber outlet in a supermarket style, running about 60,000 square feet with roughly 40,000 items on the shelves. Self-service aisles, shopping carts, and a row of registers made a lumberyard feel like a supermarket. No national competitor had tried the format then.
Suburban homeownership was booming through the 1970s and 1980s, and the chain was among the early leaders in the category. When the economy slowed, business often picked up, because homeowners were more likely to fix things themselves than hire a contractor. In the early 1980s the chain set the standard the industry measured every competitor against.
By the early 1990s the chain operated 128 stores across 24 states. Annual sales reached about $2.5 billion by fiscal 1995.
A Rival Built the Same Store Bigger
Home Depot opened its first two stores in Atlanta in 1979 with a warehouse format engineered for volume on a scale no hardware chain had attempted.
The new stores covered around 100,000 square feet, dwarfing the roughly 60,000 a typical Hechinger outlet offered. They stocked similar product ranges at lower prices through higher purchasing volume. Lowe's followed the same model into the same suburban markets.
Hechinger absorbed a struggling competitor called Builders Square in 1997, adding stores across the country. Sales at existing stores dropped roughly 15 percent in the first quarter of 1998.
When a rival could stock the same items on a bigger floor at a lower price, the pioneer's advantage disappeared.
Eighty-Eight Years and Then the Doors Closed
The Hechinger family sold the company to a private equity firm in 1997 for about $100 million. Losses accelerated after the merger.
The company filed for bankruptcy in June 1999. It listed $1.32 billion in assets and $1.39 billion in liabilities.
All 117 remaining stores closed by the end of 1999. More than 12,000 people lost their jobs.
The Blueprint Outlived the Builder
The supermarket-format home improvement warehouse lives on without the name. Self-service aisles, shopping carts, staffed project sections, and a central checkout became the standard for every competitor that followed.
Every modern store in the category runs on the layout one chain in Washington drew first. The project display, the in-store clinic, the how-to class all descend from its approach.
The company made the aisle wide enough for a shopping cart. Somebody else made it wider.
