ON THE JOB: Hughes Hardware takes tried-and-true approach

ALBANY — A great deal has changed in the hardware business since 1984, when Fussell Hughes and his parents-in-law, John and Mae Wright, opened Hughes Hardware on Johnson Road.

In that time, numerous family-owned businesses have fallen by the wayside, unable to compete with the volume and buying power of big-box stores. Hughes, however, has come up with a two-pronged business approach that’s enabled him to carve out a niche in a competitive arena: paying close attention to customers’ needs and adapting to them, and providing great customer service.

“Everybody’s got their own problem when they walk through that door,” Hughes said during a recent interview. “So you try to handle that problem and move on to the next one. It works good that way. We’ve got a good little family operation.

“It’s been a good business. We’ve gone through some tight times, and it’s still tight. You try to figure out what people really need and you give them good service and they’ll come back.”

While he’s been in the business for three and a half decades, running a family-owned hardware store was not something Hughes had planned to do early on.

“I had been in the peanut/fertilizer business,” he said. “I ran peanut-buying points and fertilizer companies. It got to the point where I wasn’t spending a whole lot of time at home, and my father-in-law, John Wright — he was a house builder here in Albany and also worked at the (Marine Corps Logistics) base — decided, ‘Let’s open a hardware store.’

“He said, ‘Can you run it?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I think I can.’ So we started in ‘84. We poured the concrete on my birthday. We opened up shortly after that.”

At the time, many of those at MCLB-Albany lived in the east Albany neighborhood where the store is located. Over the ensuing decades, the immediate community has changed, but Hughes Hardware has adapted to those changes.

“With Walmart coming in, we’ve adapted to selling products (that don’t directly compete),” Hughes said. “You can go to Walmart and buy a swing set, so we don’t handle swing sets. We handle basic needs for your house, and your lawn and garden. The business part hasn’t been taken way by Walmart. It’s just the cash flow is down. People will go into Walmart to buy one item and come out with a buggy full, so they kind of overextend.”

On items with which his store does compete with the giant retailer just down the road, Hughes says he tries to ensure his pricing is competitive. He says his niche, however, is stocking merchandise that is more difficult to find.

“We’ve got a lot of hard-to-find items. We have faucet stems and faucet repair parts that you just can’t pick up at a big-box store,” he said.

There’s also the one-on-one relationships that big-volume stores can’t duplicate.

“The thing that keeps us here is a lot of our customers we know by name and they know us,” Hughes said. “Some of them will come in and ask for me especially. Some will come in and ask for Tony (Harrell, Hughes’ only full-time employee). And then I have a couple of part-time guys that are real knowledgeable on home repair — electrical, plumbing, that kind of stuff. You keep it on a personal basis, and it’ll pay off. They’ll come back.

“We have people that come in and they’ll bring the kitchen faucet. I’ll ask what’s the matter with it and they’ll say it’s leaking. We’ve got a little work table back there and we’ll work on it, and he doesn’t have to spend the money on a new $50 faucet when we’ve repaired it and he’s seen us repair it. Next time, he just comes and gets the parts.”

In addition to folks who drop in for the “little stuff,” Hughes Hardware supplies a couple of plumbing companies in Albany that buy from it because it carries older style parts they need. Hughes carries burners and eyes for stoves, and also paint.

“We carry Valspar paint,” he said. “We don’t sell the quantities of paint, but we’ve got people with rental properties or people who want to touch up their house and we can computer match it. We’ve got a good electrical department, and we’ve got pretty much any nut and bolt you want.”

Proximity to MCLB-Albany helps.

“We’ve got contractors on the base from Texas and Tennessee and we’ll open them an account, and they’ll send in their guys to buy,” Hughes said. “We try to handle those people.”

Located off a curve on Johnson Road, Hughes Hardware got a bit off the path most traveled when the intersection was revamped. Loyal customers, however, have stayed with it, and new customers have found it, largely by word of mouth.

“A guy at the base will say there’s a hardware store right by the back gate, and they’ll come find us,” Hughes said. “People that live in their area know where we are. We’d love to be up on Oglethorpe (Boulevard), but when we built the store in ‘84, we didn’t put wheels on it.”

The store also is finding new generations of customers.

“The people that live over here, when we opened in ‘84 they’d bring their kids in here and now their kids are bringing their kids,” Hughes said. “I have people say all the time, ‘You know my mama or you know my daddy, I’m so-and-so,’ and I’ll say, ‘Man, the last time I saw you, you just could see over the counter.’”

The store, originally aligned with True Value, is now affiliated with Orgill Inc., which has a warehouse in Tifton, about 40 miles east. That proximity’s been beneficial, especially last year when storms and tornadoes hit the Albany area, damaging thousands of homes and businesses.

“When the tornadoes hit, we didn’t have a lot of things people needed, like tarps,” Hughes said. “I placed an order and went and picked it up that day in Tifton and had it back here within four or five hours for people that needed them. Even in the flood in ‘94, it (the relationship) worked real well because we could go to that warehouse, pick it (an order) up and get it back here real quick. It’s real handy.”

Hughes said he was lucky during the 2017 storms, which damaged much of east Albany and the nearby Marine base. A power surge, however, knocked out the store’s computers for several days.

“We operated about four or five weeks the old way — with an invoice and a piece of paper,” he said. “When the computers came back up, I entered it all back in. Everybody cooperated with us. We got the people what they needed. On the spur of the moment, everybody was hunting for tarps and nails and stuff like that.”

As the needs changed during the recovery from the storms, Hughes said he adjusted the store’s inventory to meet the needs of his customers.

Hughes says he’s not looking at retirement anytime soon, though he would like to have more flexibility in taking time away from the store. Deeply involved with the Exchange Club of Albany, he also serves on the service organization’s district board in Georgia. He also sells his “Pa Bill’s” barbecue sauce, made from his granddad’s recipe, in a number of local stores. It has earned the coveted Georgia Grown label. Then there’s that lakeside cabin up at Lake Blackshear that he’d like to visit a little more often.

“I’ve got to have something to do, but I’d like for it to get where I can just take off when I need to — or when I want to,” he said. “When we have a function at the Exchange Club, I like to be off where I can go to it.”

“My wife has retired and she knows I have to have something to do. I can’t sit around the house.”

It’s hasn’t always been easy, but Hughes says he’s enjoyed his years in the business.

“I look back to when we opened the store and my father-in-law and mother-in-law were working at the base,” he said. “They’d come out and work during the week. Things were tight (financially). I’d pick up a job here and there. I’d work with James Equipment and then come out there on Friday and work the weekend so they could take off. You do what you can for your family, and they did a lot for me to put us here.”

There were times when Hughes said he didn’t know “whether you’re going to make your salary or not.”

“I remember when we first did $100 in a day, and it was kind of like a celebration.” he said. “Now, it’s holding its on. It’s tight. You watch your inventory; you have what people need. You hate to miss a sale on something, but I’d rather miss a sale on a skill saw than to miss a sale on a piece of PVC. That may be wrong, but it’s worked.”

Hughes’ parents-in-law have passed, but the hardware store is still a family business. One brother-in-law helps with the Johnson Road store while another brother-in-law runs the family’s Ace Hardware store on U.S. Highway 19.

“It’s all family,” Hughes said.