MAGAZINES 
Hardware Heaven
By Mark Collins
Photos by Greg Lefcourt
What’s (probably) the only place on Earth where you can stand in line to have a key made or a lamp repaired, then swivel and grab a can of Silly String, then bend around the corner to eye a new lithium-ion cordless impact drill?
Admit it, you’ve daydreamed about what it would be like to wear the green vest and work among 200,000 gizmos, doohickeys and thing-amabobs. Because the people in the green vests always seem to know what you’re looking for, even if you have trouble explaining what it is.
Here are eight things you may not know about McGuckin Hardware, Boulder’s long-standing place to go for just about anything you need … except roof shingles, milk and a certain kind of plug.
Mcguckin liked to fish
Bill McGuckin opened his store in Boulder in 1955. He was an avid outdoorsman, and his original vision for the store was a little bit different from what the store became. “The business originally was going to be a fly-fishing shop,” says Randy Dilkes, a manager who’s worked at McGuckin Hardware for 34 years. “That’s what Bill McGuckin was all about. But there wasn’t enough season for that, and he expanded.”
The original store’s name was McGuckin Hardware and Sporting Goods. It was 8,000 square feet in size and employed four people. Once McGuckin expanded beyond the sporting-goods idea, things snowballed. “Whatever Boulder would ask for, Bill would research and come up with it,” Dilkes says.
Culture decidedly noncorporate
Five years later, McGuckin brought his son-in-law, Dave Hight, into the business. Dave’s son, Barry Hight, is the current president and Dave’s grandson, Jason, is a manager. There are at least 23 people on staff with more than 20 years’ experience at McGuckin. Dilkes believes that the store’s being family owned and family run accounts for many employees’ hanging around a long time.
“It’s very noncorporate,” he says. “Having the family here every day—it’s one of those things that makes you feel good. You’ll see 82-year-old Dave Hight climbing the ladder with a feather duster, dusting the shelves in the housewares department. This guy loves this place.”
Though there have been overtures from investors to turn McGuckin into a chain, the ownership has always declined. “The reality is that we could never replicate what we have here, because we can’t have this group of buyers and managers at two places at once,” says marketing manager Randy Barker. “On top of that, this store has really been tailored to Boulder. If you picked it up and put it in virtually any other location, it probably wouldn’t do as well.”
Green vests
McGuckin employs roughly 280 people, the majority of whom work the floor as customer-service clerks. The iconic green vests they wear came along in 1978, when the store expanded to its current location on Folsom Street, in The Village shopping center. Before that, the customer-service people who worked the floor just wore nametags. No consultants were hired to decide which color the vests should be, though. Dilkes says the color choice probably came from an association with the Irish name McGuckin.
‘Under the sink, you’ll find a valve … ’
Ever wonder why McGuckin hasn’t jumped on the how-to seminar bandwagon, when its big-box competitors hold them regularly? Ran Ransom, a manager in his 42nd year with McGuckin, says it’s because the store’s sales staff is trained to give how-to lessons on the spot, whenever they are asked. That includes how to change a washer on a leaking faucet.
“We’ll have single mothers come in that are really tight with finances,” he says. “They’re just scared to death to call a plumber because it’ll cost them $100 or more, so we walk them through being able to turn off the water, which screws to take off, how to take off the handle and replace the washer. They come back and they’re just raving because they did it for 50 cents.”
Competing with the big box
In 2006, some wondered if McGuckin would survive when The Home Depot opened four blocks east at Twenty Ninth Street Retail District. Although McGuckin noticed a slight drop for a few months, business quickly picked back up and has been steady since, Barker says. The management team never adopted a strategy to compete with the new neighbor, he says. “We just kept doing the things we do, but maybe focused on doing them a little better.”
Knowing their departments
The store employs numerous people who have extensive backgrounds in the area they work. “We have people in the plumbing aisle that are currently plumbers and work here part time, and we have retired plumbers and electricians,” Barker says. “The fly-fishing clerks are avid fishermen.”
That expertise benefits the customers, but it’s also because of the customer, Ransom adds. “Boulder is a very intelligent community. It kind of demands that we be intelligent with our product.”
Inventory every hour on the hour
The store boasts 65,000 square feet of space, but what you see is not all there is to McGuckin’s vast inventory. The store has a warehouse in north Boulder that occupies nearly 50,000 square feet, and trucks run between the two locations each hour so the shelves stay stocked. “If someone came in and needed 60 cans of white spray paint, we may have 12 on the shelf,” Barker says, “but within an hour we could likely bring in the rest of what they need.”
No milk, no shingles …
It’s not common that customers ask salespeople for things McGuckin doesn’t stock, but it happens. For example, Dilkes says, people sometimes ask for groceries or roof shingles, neither of which the store carries.
Ransom recalls a certain type of plug a customer once asked for that he couldn’t supply. “The owner of the store and I were standing in the center of the store and this gray-haired lady came up to us. I bet she was probably in her early 70s,” Ransom says. “She had a McGuckin shopping cart. In it she had this large, brown natural-rubber thing, the likes of which I’d never seen. It was probably 20 inches long and maybe 6 inches in diameter.
“She came to where Dave and I were standing and in a very loud voice she said, ‘Who can help me find a plug for my artificial horse vagina?’ Dave pushed me toward her and said, ‘You go ahead, Ran.’”
It turned out the woman needed a replacement plug for a latex device used to engage a male horse to gather semen for artificial insemination. That customer left unsatisfied. “She wouldn’t take a cork plug because she was afraid the activity would blow the cork out,” Ransom says, laughing. “We could not find a plug that would work.” u
Mark Collins is not worthy of the green vest, but he is a freelance writer who lives in Boulder.
Greg Lefcourt, manager and co-owner of Ozo Coffee Co., worked at McGuckin Hardware when he was in high school.
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