Maricopa’s explosive growth has attracted the two monoliths of hardware retail, Home Depot and Lowe’s Home Improvement, back-to-back. You might think that terrifies Maricopa Ace Hardware owner Dave Karsten.

You’d be wrong.

Karsten is unfazed by competition from these big-box behemoths. He’s seen it several times before with the orange and blue home improvement emporiums cropping up in the other Valley cities in which Karsten also has Ace Hardware stores. But he keeps coming up red.

Tractor Supply Co. has already opened a Maricopa store, but Karsten shrugged it off. Same with the rumors that Harbor Freight will move into the old 99 Cents Only store at John Wayne Parkway and Edison Road.

And he’ll keep on shrugging.

“The reality is we compete with them every day in general nationally, and our company has five stores,” Karsten said. “We compete with Home Depot, Lowe’s and Tractor Supply every day.”

Karsten has other Ace Hardware stores in Goodyear, North Phoenix, Carefree and Cave Creek, where the titans of hardware and lumber all have market shares.

Selling something different

Besides having been there and done that, Karsten said he and other Ace brand stores survive by offering unique items and exclusive products.

“Ace in general encourages finding niche products,” Karsten said. “They encourage you to develop your own inventory. It’s very not cookie cutter.”

Karsten said product exclusivity is another ace in the hole.

“How we go to market is by doing it on service, convenience and product,” Karsten said. “It’s big names that choose not to be in big boxes that our customers want.”

For instance, Karsten’s Ace Hardware has an exclusive deal to sell Stihl products.

“You’re not going to see them in a big box because Stihl doesn’t want to sell it to them in a box,” Karsten said. “It’s a piece of machinery that requires skill, so they want you to train the customer and they want you to show the customer how it works. That one-on-one interaction is hard to have happen just by sheer size.”

Another business survival technique is adapting to the market, Karsten said.

“We sell farm feed in Cave Creek because it’s in heavily populated horse country,” Karsten said. “So, we’re a feed store as much as we are a hardware store.”

An Ace Hardware outlet in Austin, Texas, tapped into its neighborhood market of “soccer moms” by opening boutiques to sell baby clothes within existing Ace store space. The stores have also become popular among women because they sell Le Crueset pots and pans.

More aprons, more patrons

Karsten’s Maricopa Ace Hardware has a staff of 35 people and one cat, Smokey, the store’s chief mouser and a customer favorite known for napping on registers and piles of merchandise.

Smokey aside, the labor force means the associate-to-customer ratio is far greater than in a big-box store, where one might wander the length of a football field before finding help.
Ace Maricopa has 15,000 square feet of space and sells 30,000 unique products, Karsten said.

Maricopa is Karsten’s largest store. His four other locations average 25 employees each, still a healthy number for the comparatively small retailer.

That allows Karsten’s stores, including Maricopa, to provide faster service to customers who have a hardware problem they need to solve when they enter the business.

Bill Hurley, Southwest regional manager for Ace Hardware, lauded Karsten’s approach.

Pinnacle of retail

“Dave runs a nice operation,” Hurley, who oversees 275 stores in Arizona, New Mexico and Southern California from his office in Chandler, told InMaricopa.

Hurley said the Ace corporation tags Karsten as a “pinnacle retailer,” meaning he operates the store “at the highest level possible.”

Hurley said part of the company’s “secret sauce” is encouraging associates to offer customers personal help when they are roaming the aisles for the product they need.

Asked about future expansion in Maricopa, Karsten said, “It’s been a challenge for us to expand in other categories.”

That’s because there is limited contiguous space available where Ace is in the Cobblestone Fiesta shopping center, 21542 N. John Wayne Pkwy. Should lease space open next door, that might be an option, Karsten said.

“Really, it’s about experiential retail,” Karsten said. “The last thing you want is someone saying, ‘I went online and then I came into the store, and it was meh.’”