Busy Bee Retools for Survival

As Don Kidson recalls, after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, customers clambered to Busy Bee Hardware to stock up on the supplies they needed to rebuild.

But customers don't line up like they used to and the business many of the locals have relied on for decades is now facing its own emergency, managers said.

“If it’s going the way it’s going we’ll be going out of business,” said Hunter, the store's operations director. 

To stay in business in the future, owner Don Kidson and Hunter are looking to the past. They want to restore the extensive inventory it once boasted and hire knowledgable staff, the two facets they believe used to be the mom and pop shop's greatest strengths.

Built in 1922—before even sidewalks and roads—Busy Bee is one of the oldest commercial establishments in Santa Monica, according to Kidson. He bought the store in 1963 with his father-in-law Marshall Baker Higgins. Higgins already had experience working in the industry as a traveling hardware salesman.

“People who came in then were usually all these little inventing buffs with garages down the street,” Kidson said. “They’d come back and forth, four or five times a day, because they couldn’t have all the little gadgets and parts and nuts and bolts that they needed as they were building. There were so many inventions and businesses that were started here.”

Kidson said it was Baker who was responsible for Busy Bee’s eclectic inventory; he took extra care to ensure the store had everything its competitors didn’t.

That knowledge was lost six years ago when Baker died of cancer. He sold his ownership to Kidson.

It was at the time that Kidson, now 79, said he approached Hunter because he needed someone to start taking over at the store which was already beginning to suffer financially because of what he described as mismanagement.

Chris Torres, Busy Bee's floor manager, was hired two years later, just as the recession hit.

When he first started working there, he said contractors and their entire work crews would stop in and buy up the supplies they needed, but these days the contractors come alone and less frequently.

“It’s tough out there,” Torres said. Some of the store’s most loyal customers have been the hardest hit by the economy, he said.

Today, Kidson and Hunter said the stores has everything it once did—emergency kits included.

Inside, the antique wood floors buckle under the weight of shelves loaded with tools, nails and old knobs. The store is still home to an antique scale manufactured in 1911, and believed to  be the oldest accurate scale still in use in Los Angeles county.

Whether contractors and would-be inventors are in a position to purchase supplies, however, is out of their control.

“I’m in to win, but you can’t just make people come to the store," said Hunter.