Recent Features, News & Products from Hardware Connection
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2026 Beacon Awards: Living Up to a Name
Standing onstage to accept the 2026 Best New Store Beacon Award in Orlando, Florida, this July, Julie Walker-Martin thanked her team, True Value and the people who helped turn a difficult project into a successful store. Then she talked about her father. Howard Walker spent decades serving Henrietta, Texas, as a teacher and pastor. From…
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2026 Beacon Awards: Still Looking for What’s Next
Retail Beacon Awards recipient Bill Gilbert marks six decades growing Gilbert’s Hardware & Appliance in Owosso, Michigan, and beyond. Gilbert started working in his parents’ 20-foot-wide Western Auto store when he was 11 years old. Six decades later, the business bears little resemblance to the place where he cut up boxes, stocked merchandise and handled…
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2026 Beacon Awards: Contractor Smarts Drive Fast Growth
Before Riverside Building Materials opened its doors to the public, David Reyna gave the business a test run. For several months in early 2023, the new Rio Grande City, Texas, operation supplied Reyna’s own construction company. Having spent nearly three decades in construction building 50 to 70 homes a year, Reyna knew the frustrations contractors…
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2026 Beacon Awards: Navigating the Local Current
Tommy Simpson was having a bad day when he learned he had won the 2026 Retail Beacon Award. He was standing on a ladder, cutting a hole in the side of a brand-new house for an exhaust vent, when his CFO called with the news. “That took me from one mood to another,” Simpson recalls.…
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2026 Beacon Awards: Hitching Onto a Bigger Idea
Three times in one week, customers walked into Big Rapids Cash & Carry looking for a trailer hitch. Each time, the answer was essentially the same: We’re a lumberyard. We’re not a hardware store. To owner David VanderWeele, the encounters pointed to a larger problem. He had purchased the Big Rapids, Michigan, business in 2020…
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2026 Beacon Awards: Building on Brotherly Love
Mark and Joe Jaconski have grown Stanley’s True Value Hardware in Philadelphia and Oreland, Pennsylvania, strengthening their partnership while preparing a fourth generation to take the next step. When Mark Jaconski was a kid, he had big plans for Stanley’s Hardware. “I used to joke that we were going to buy up the entire block…
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Do it Best Reports $5 Billion in Sales as True Value Integration Advances
Do it Best Group closed fiscal 2026 with $5 billion in consolidated sales, up 3.8% from the previous fiscal year, and will distribute $132.9 million in patronage to its member-owners as the cooperative reports progress integrating True Value. The Fort Wayne, Indiana-based company says the integration has now reached deeply into merchandising and distribution, including…
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How to Protect From Theft Without Losing the Sale
Hardware retailers confronting theft face an uncomfortable balancing act: Protect merchandise aggressively enough to reduce shrink versus keeping your store customer friendly and easy to shop. That tradeoff is the focus of the July 2026 white paper “The Complex Relationship Between Shrink Management & On-Shelf Availability: Finding the Balance to Drive Incremental Sales,” by David…
