Good news for the city treasury that Home Depot will open a
store in the Lawrence Oaks Center space vacated by Kmart this year
and bring in some badly needed sales taxes.
Good news for the city treasury that Home Depot will open a store in the Lawrence Oaks Center space vacated by Kmart this year and bring in some badly needed sales taxes. Bad news for Ace Hardware/Johnson Lumber, the locally owned store on Tennant Avenue.
However, according to Mike Johnson, the store’s owner, he and his team will not take the big box incursion lying down. While he does assume that Home Depot will have some effect on his business, he has plans to lessen the affect.
“We have a 20,000 square-foot addition in the works – ready in April or May, 2004 – that will double our retail space,” Johnson said, “and we will expand our parking spots from 30 to 80.”
The Butterfield Boulevard extension will dead end – for the time being – at Johnson’s Hardware, (plus the nearby medical building and freeway services, under consideration by the city) bringing more business.
Retail hardware accounts for only 20 percent of the store’s sales, Johnson said. They do a great deal of lumber contracting and also a significant amount of custom door business, some of which comes from Gilroy Home Depot referrals.
“We get between three and five referrals on the weekends,” Johnson said. “I see Home Depot being more competition for Lowe’s than for us. But we may have to pull the gloves off down here. In the end we will be a stronger player on the field.”
Johnson also said he will continue customer appreciation days and other events and efforts to make Morgan Hill feel more at home in his store. So, hang in there, Mike.
We’d also like to compliment the city for working hard to lasso a new business for the empty Kmart space, leaving it vacant for only a few months instead of the years-long estimate some had predicted.
Along the same business route, Comcast, the cable television giant, locating its call center in town and bringing upwards of 500 jobs to town is another patch of good news.
