I’m doing something for work and was wondering if anyone at the space shops at Elliots hardware or knows anyone who works at Elliots.
I’ve visited the Inwood location infrequently when I’m working in the area.
I was an avid regular in the days of yore when they were in Grapevine and near Harry Hines in the Med Center area.
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Why yes I do. I shopped at Grapevine before it closed. Shopped at Plano at both locations, current and old location. Dallas all 3 locations. Maple and Motor street(Medical District now), Denton Dr Cutoff (next what used to be Herreras) and the current off Inwood by the Police Station. Also Mesquite.
Dallas used to be great but I get it, times change. Hard to stay competitive.
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Years ago, I shopped the Elliot’s store on Maple in Dallas. I loved that you could rummage around and discover real treasures. Things that had been in their inventory for decades, and they were squirreled away in some corner of the place. It was fun just to look around. If you found something interesting there was a good chance it still had the original price on it, too. I worked at the Infomart back then, and I’d poke around on my lunch breaks.
When they moved/closed down the store on Maple I shopped mostly at the one in Plano. Then they moved across the street. Each time they got more modern and had more commodity stuff. Their motto used to be “Elliots the Hardware Store that has everything, even the hard to find things” or something like that.
Now, it more or less has to compete with the big box boys and the likes of Ace Hardware. My favorite Farmers Branch (local) hardware store was Turner’s. It got bought by Ace and it too went through a “big box change”. No more treasures to be found there either.
The same with Tanners. I used to love to go in and just scrounge for those little treasure you couldn’t find elsewhere. For that matter, Radio Shack used to be a pretty cool store to poke around in, too. They are now gone.
I get it they have to make a profit to stay in business, but there are fewer and fewer stores for tinkerers and makers to poke around in. I for one am sad about the number of brick and mortar places that have been forced to close.
Buying on Amazon just isn’t the same as browsing, poking around and turning things over and over in your hands.
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This is all really good insight!
I may reach out next week for some follow up depending on how the meetings later today.
Yeah we’re kind of seeing the end of an era in retailing. The technical specialist/enthusiast B&M store has fallen by the wayside as the internet assumes the role of both knowledge and supplier for so many hobbies.
It somewhat pains me to speak ill of Tanners, but they seemingly did not want to live in the 21st century. I’m not talking about their website, their store layout, manual checkout procedures, etc. But their selection of products, which I found to be heavily biased towards 1980s Radio Shack and out of step with how people younger than ~50 approach the electronics hobby. Yeah there’s always going to be a place for breadboards and thru-hole components. But deadbug and DIY PCB etching seems to be on the decline while module integration and quick/cheap pro-made custom PCBs are on the rise.
Example: I’ve tinkered with DIY LED lighting fixtures for years and bought zero LEDs (or LED-specific components) from Tanner.
- Power LEDs pulling >1W
how about some <100mW indicator LEDs in 3/5/10mm thru-hole packages? - LED tape
got one reel in stock - >6500K angry blue - maybe go to LED City down 35E? - Commodity LED driver
why not roll your own with discrete components (that will consume more power than the LEDs)? - Li-ion cells
got some random low-capacity NiMH
The above is not why Tanners closed up shop, but I suspect it contributed - the customer base tended a decade+ older than me and my twenties were more than twenty years ago.
Rob and I had this conversation, and he indicated that an increasing portion of his business was industrial and that the components demand was drying up along with the availability of surplus parts.
When the closure was pending he said they might come back in another location with a more industrially oriented store front.
I can see that. Probably a lot of maintenance businesses that have to maintain inventory of - or be able to quickly source - a variety of components: relays, contactors, wiring harnesses, fuses, arcane DIP packages. They then either go replace them or possibly engage in workbench repair of various control boards for major equipment.
A former employer did similar - especially with older equipment. Use a schematic to repair an old controller - or just sketch it out and reverse-engineer the thing to re-implement using discrete components on a DIN rail with cam timers and discrete inline components.
I speculated heavily about the former which doubtlessly contributed to the latter.
Eric, I recall taking a course from Brandon Dunson where we created our own Arduino board from components and our own PCB design which we sent out to have printed/made. Hackaday sponsored the class and it was a great class. Hackaday even paid for PIzza for lunch.
Brandon I believe worked at Tanners at the time or at least indicated he was working with him. He sourced a lot of his components from there. Admittedly, it is a different day and time, but making the board was a blast.
I was friends with the former owner and represented the store for years. Happy to discuss my insights on the business.
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I live right down the road from one, but typically go to my local Ace (Stone’s Ace). They have free beer, nuff said.
Weirdly the Elliot’s feels kind of corporate and the Ace has fun local hardware store vibes. Plus the employees are cool and they have a good selection of nuts and bolts.
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A big chunk of Ace Store owners are single store franchisees. My family had one in the 70’s. There are no corporate stores. The most ‘corporate’ they get is big mutlistore franchisees like Westlake who bought Turners.
Yep, My local hardware store switch from Ace to Do-It-Best because the franchise fees were significantly lower.
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Ace has historically had the highest fees, but they also had a substantially better distribution system, buying power, and a number of other benefits. That said, I’m told the larger multistore groups are starting to get an advantage in the fee structure and that is driving single store owners to other brands.