Ever since Elizabeth Shipley-Moses and her husband John moved to Falls Church, Virginia, in 1977, they’ve been deliberate about shopping at Brown’s Hardware.
If she needs a screw, a store staff member will find one. When there are things that she thinks are fixable, but that nobody else wanted to fix, those same workers offered their support.
At larger retail stores, Shipley-Moses said, you can buy a package of 100 screws. At the Falls Church shop, customers can get just what they need.
“It’s very sad,” Shipley-Moses said, after telling a store worker that she’d be back soon to say goodbye, before the store closes for good. “Pretty soon we won’t have stores like this.”
The shop, which James Brown launched in the 1800s as a general store, stayed in his family for three generations. It evolved into a full-service hardware store, which cuts glass, repairs screens and windows and sells plumbing, electrical and garden supplies. They emphasized customer service, which helped them compete with nearby Home Depot.
But the Brown family suspected there would come a time that the business wouldn’t be worth as much as the property. John Taylor, the current owner, said the executor of the family’s estate received an offer that was too good to pass up.
Current plans, Taylor said, have the space being transformed into a restaurant. The closing on the real estate is set for April 1, but he said, “We will probably be here pretty much to the end.”
ARLNow first reported the store’s plans to close.
“The offer that came through was good, and at the time, he (the executor) thought it was time to do it,” Taylor said.
The store has been on the same corner for 142 years, Taylor said. When Route 29 was expanded, a new store had to be built.
Brown’s has been a community fixture for so long, at one point, the shop had the only phone line to the only doctor in town.
Many of the store’s customers live within walking distance, Taylor said, or within a mile or two by car. The shop offered free delivery for mulch, and focused on the “little things,” such as lamp and screen repair.
Business soared during the pandemic, because many people worked from home, but there’s been a “steady decline” every month ever since, Taylor said.
“We weighed in all the factors — declining business, how people would come in and they’d say, ‘Well, thanks for the help, but I punched my phone in here, and I still can get it cheaper on Amazon or at Home Depot, so I’m going to go there,’” Taylor said.
“That’s kind of disheartening when that kind of stuff happens after you spent 15 minutes working with the customer on plumbing or something,” he added.
Some of the older residents will struggle, Taylor suspects, because they don’t have technology to be able to assist them with a plumbing or paint job or electrical repair.
But a new Whole Foods opened across the street from Brown’s, and there are new condominiums too, “so that’s just a sign of the times. That’s what they want. They want the tax base, and that’s about the end of that,” Taylor said.
Many of the neighborhood’s younger residents, Taylor said, are buying big houses with small yards, and they have an HOA that maintains the lawn and handles repairs.
“It’s just a different generation coming up now,” Taylor said. “It’s not going to be the same ever again.”
John Moses called Brown’s a “fixture in the city.”
“Things don’t last forever,” Moses said. “Considering when this started, it’s amazing it lasted this long.”
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