York Corner
Moseying around Meadowbrook Plaza this week, we spied Fastenal, a business newly arrived in the spot once occupied by various supermarkets, and when we poked our head in at a quiet time on Monday, we found general manager Mike Bruno behind the counter, pleasant and accommodating, and very willing to fill us in on both he and the business.
The new store, he told us, is one of some 2,000 outlets run by Fastenal and spread about throughout the U.S. and Canada. Founded in 1967 by one Bob Kierlin in Winona, Minn., corporate headquarters are still located there, the company works primarily to provide industrial and construction supplies to contractors, and at wholesale prices. Accordingly, Mike said, most of its stores tend to be set up like stockrooms and situated in industrial areas, with sales generated via catalog and by salesmen out on the road.
The York store represents a little something of a departure from that pattern, Mike said, in being set up "like a display for our accounts," or a "showroom for our contractors, to let them see what we have" - though its clientele remains primarily contractors. Hence, Mike explained, Fastenal is the place to go for two, three or more bags of screws or bolts, but not for just two screws - and he gave us a tour to reveal the variety of offerings available: one whole long wall of those screws, bolts and other fasteners, plus metal of various types and configurations that can be cut to specification, Jonesway (Fastenal's brand) hand tools, safety gear (glasses, webbing, Tyvek suits, etc.), janitorial supplies, welders' gear, fishermen's gear, electrical parts, bearings, rivets, ladders, cleaning solvents, hydraulic tools - the list is seemingly endless and includes, in Mike's words, "anything a big company needs."
Additionally, a mustard-yellow sign on the wall states, in big black print, "If it's not on our shelf, we will make it. We make the unavailable part available."
The 5,000-square-foot York store opened on Nov. 15, Mike reported, joining 14 other Fastenal shops in Maine and 18 in New Hampshire. The closest of those, he added, are in Biddeford, Dover, Sanford and Portsmouth, and he hazarded a guess that establishment of the York shop was evidence that his company has faith that York and the area immediately around it will continue to grow.
"I think we haven't scratched the surface yet," he said.
The hike in gas prices, he also noted when we inquired, has helped make trips to sales tax-free New Hampshire for supplies less appealing, while Fastenal's wholesale prices contribute to sweetening its appeal for locals - who are supposed to pay a tax, anyway, on items purchased in New Hampshire.
Customers are, typically, Mike said, in addition to contractors, hospitals, restaurants, car dealerships, cleaners and more.
"We don't sell lumber," he laughed, adding that, when individuals come in seeking hardware store items he doesn't have, or doesn't offer in small quantities, he sends them off to Eldredge or to York Corner True Value.
We did note, however, in a stroll around, that the shop had on display quite a few hardware-store goods - snow shovels, for example, and Ice-Melt, and items like gloves, wrenches and hand-tools, so it's worth a visit, actually, by anybody.
Additionally, we should report, the company delivers - and then, when its half-ton V8 SLT Dodge delivery trucks are two years old, offers them for sale to the public. Mike told us that his store will get one such truck to start with.
For Mike, a York resident with his family since 1999, the arrival of this store has proved a godsend.
He'd been laid off, he told us, from a job for Sun Microsystems in Burlington, Mass., where's he'd been program manager in logistics for hi-tech, when that company downsized, and he'd been scrambling for work since - putting in some time, for example, as a mail-sorter for Liberty Mutual, running a machine enabling the company to get out as many as 150,000 pieces of mail a night, he said. In college, he added (he graduated from Norwich University in 1973), he worked in construction, he'd also been a salesman selling temporary help to firms west of Boston, and when we asked him to describe his work for Sun Microsystems, he said, simply, "I was parts support for customer service. If a computer broke down, people came to me for parts."
The result: an apparently neat fit with Fastenal.
Mike grew up in Lawrence, Mass., he told us when we asked, then moved to Andover with his family when he started high school. When we inquired as to how he and his wife, Susan, had met, he responded, with a laugh, "in high school Spanish class," and when we asked if they'd then been high school sweethearts, he said, no, it had taken a while. "But," he volunteered, "we finally figured out we were meant for each other." They were married in June of 1973.
Their connections to this region go back a bit, he reported. His family had a vacation place in Rye and her family (her maiden name was Caldwell) had one for years on Garrison Avenue in York.
Susan is now a nurse at both York Middle School and York High School, their younger daughter, Amanda, is a nurse at Portsmouth Hospital, and their older daughter, Karen, runs The Nautical Dog shop, right next door to Fastenal.
Karen and other Meadowbrook connections helped make the link to Fastenal, Mike said. He'd become friends with Jamie and Debbie Morse, who run the little Italian restaurant there, and it was Jamie, who's a firefighter at Massport in Boston, who told Mike about the Fastenal opening.
Mike is himself a York volunteer firefighter, he told us early on in our talk, as are Susan, Karen and Amanda, who are all EMT-trained. Mike, in fact, has just been elected president, for a three-year term, of the York Village Fire Corporation, where Susan is also serving as secretary - and it's clear that the firefighting means a lot to him.
"I'm 55 going on 20," he laughed, "and I think the Fire Department keeps me young."
Before we finished, we discovered that he and Susan had been among those who'd scraped us up out of a ditch after an accident we had close to three years ago, so, when we parted, in addition to wishing him long life and his business every success, we thanked him warmly and mightily and personally. Fastenal: making welcome connections it never dreamed of!
The new store, by the way, is open from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.
