Dan Badger and his friend John Purdin built a makeshift stage in the back of Yellow Springs Hardware just a few hours before a recent blues show.
“We figured we’d throw a quick 8X8 stage together,” said Badger, who owns the store.
The stage is made from old, graffitied wood that used to be a kickball wall at Mills Lawn Elementary School. Badger and Purdin recently replaced the wall for the school.
“It was pretty shabby,” Purdin said. “So we updated it, and actually the school called not too long ago to ask if it was OK for the students to start tagging it again when the year ends. When the sixth graders graduate, they get to sign their names.”
The stage isn’t the first unique move Dan Badger has made.
When he bought the hardware store a few years ago, one of the first things he did was put a chess set, a table and chairs on the sidewalk out front. A “No Loitering” sign stood in the window, but he altered it so it now reads, “Yes! Loitering.”
“I like people that play chess,” Badger said. “They're really fun people to have around. They're usually pretty smart and thoughtful, and part of what we were trying to do was attract the kind of people that we wanted to hang around.”
And running an independent hardware store in a small village is a bit like playing chess. When Badger and his wife debated buying the business, they looked at the numbers and realized they’d have to subsidize the retail operation.
“We entered this situation knowing that trying to use this just as a hardware store was going to be a failure,” Badger said. “That’s where the shows and the handyman service and the restoration work and the fabrication work and building the radios and bee traps and all those things came out of.”
One example of how traditional retail doesn’t always work well for small hardware anymore is paint — Badger doesn't sell it.
“The network of resources available to independent hardware retailers has become really limited,” he said, and carrying a good variety of indoor and outdoor paints would require “spending tens of thousand dollars on inventory that has an expiration date.”
That’s one of the reasons Yellow Springs Hardware wound up offering so many services and shows, but no paint.
The shows have been a success so far, selling out and making locals happy.
“Oh my God! I think it's great,” Patti Davis said. “I grew up here. My dad used to bring us. It was sort of a special thing to go down to the basement where they had toys and pick out a toy.”
The hardware store has hosted musicians like Bob Lucas and George Beiri, who hook up a PA and put the speakers up on the shelves. There’s one very wide aisle with rows of seats, and the crowds like to sing along.
Concerts and improv comedy aren’t the only ticketed events. Molly Finch of Goldfinch Garden Design gave a lecture on invasive ground cover recently.
“There are a few plants that keep showing up over and over again that a lot of homeowners have,” Finch said, “but they don't necessarily know what they are or especially not why they're harmful.”
After her talk and Q&A, Finch took the audience out of the hardware store on a field trip. They walked the village, identifying invasives using the handouts and pressed leaves she gave the class.
Finch says what Badger is doing with Yellow Springs Hardware is smart.
“It's really important for small businesses like this to have alternate ways of having more vibrancy and income,” she said. “Because you can go to a big box store and buy a lot of the same products. So it's not just about getting people the products; it's about being a space where people can talk about the issues that they're having as homeowners."
Perhaps not surprisingly, Badger remembers going to the store as a kid. Back then, Wilbur Deaton owned the store, and he’d save old keys that were cut wrong for the young Badger.
“When I was basically my son's age, I had a keychain,” he said. “I looked like a janitor at a college or something with this huge 50 pound keyring of all of Wilbur's screw ups.”
Now, with keys that work, Badger is trying to create a hardware store that doubles as a third space for the village, and he keeps a picture of Wilbur on the fridge.
