Busy Bee Hardware: Holds On, Holds Out

Kevin Allardice
Mirror contributing writer
  
   In Santa Monica since 1914 and at its current location at 1521 Santa Monica Boulevard since 1922, Busy Bee Hardware is a kind of quaint affront to modern merchandizing techniques.
   Compared to the more familiar uber-hardware stores with their sprawling layouts and diversity of merchandise, Busy Bee is tiny and single-minded. It sells hardware – not beach chairs or bathroom mirrors or desk lamps – and it has a large, loyal and longrunning clientele.
   As one longtime customer said, “If you go to Busy Bee once, you’ll go back because it’s got everything and you can sort of poke around and find really useful stuff.”
   To enter Busy Bee is to be reminded that once, long ago, family businesses were the rule, and were quite sufficient. The store’s hardwood floors are worn smooth now. Its shelves are crowded with bins of nuts and bolts and screws and washers of every size and shape. Each bin bears a handwritten label, and every square inch of the store’s walls is covered with hardware of all sorts.
   Indeed, space seems to be the one thing Busy Bee doesn’t have in stock, and space is the only thing it needs – space for a larger store and parking space for its customers.
   Busy Bee owner Don Kidson took over the store from his father-in-law in 1963 — on, believe it or not, April Fool’s day, a prophetic date perhaps, given the jokes Kidson alleges the City has been playing on his small business.
   He has been talking about expanding for a while, hoping to avoid the fate of other independent Santa Monica hardware stores that have been priced out by fancy, high end businesses. Now, with the imminent departure of Fisher Lumber, the pressure on Kidson to expand and fill the gap is increasing. Though he has yet to begin the process of navigating his way through what he sees as the City’s procedural labyrinth — the endless permits and approvals, he already sounds wary, and weary.
   He spoke about the ways in which, in his view, City policies, rules and regulations have taken the decision-making power away from business owners like himself and ceded it to City employees who keep passing the buck. “There’s no leeway,” he said, “for people to use common sense or to think.”
   Peter Davidson, a Santa Monica resident who has been a loyal customer of both Fisher and Busy Bee since 1977, said, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been saved by Busy Bee….They have all this arcane stuff you can’t get anywhere.” Now he is disturbed by Fisher’s impending departure and the possibility that Busy Bee will not expand to fill the void. In that case, he said, he will have to drive all the way to Home Depot, south of the Marina, in order to find the tools and equipment he needs for his endless home repair/improvement projects. In the midst of some job or other, he says he goes to the hardware store as many as six times a day. It’s a three minute round trip drive for him now, but without Busy Bee, his three-minute trips will expand to thirty minutes.
   The City “claims to care about the environment,” he said, “but this is going to bring more smog,” as residents in search of nuts and bolts are forced to leave Santa Monica to find them.
   “I think Busy Bee is more important than Hooter’s, believe it or not,” Davidson said, noting that the City caters more to tourists than residents. “They [the City] forget that people actually live here,” he said, “not just tourists.”
   Kidson’s reluctance to dive into the red tape involved in expansion has been exacerbated by the store’s current parking problems, which he blames on the City. As it has no parking of its own, Busy Bee customers must park on the street. That was sufficient for years, but it no longer is. Kidson speaks of seeing customers circling the block in vain, searching for a space, and eventually giving up and driving away.
   Busy Bee’s parking problems got worse when the Mitsubishi dealership next door rented three parking spaces on Santa Monica Boulevard from the City in order to provide valet parking for their customers. The auto dealer pays the City $1750 annually for use of the three parking spaces, as well as the meter charge of fifty cents an hour for each of the three spaces. Not surprisingly, its business hours eclipse Busy Bee’s.
   “They were pretty irate,” Kidson said about his customers’ response to the loss of the parking spaces. So irate, in fact, that they began to circulate a petition. “We collected a lot of signatures, and took them into City Hall. We never got any official response from the City.”
   Bill Bortfeld, the City’s acting Parking Coordinator, explained the logic behind the City’s rental of parking spaces for valet parking. Presumably, the cars handed over to the valets are parked off the street, leading to a net increase in public street parking. “That’s why,” Bortfeld said, “from the City’s perspective, valet parking helps.”
   Kidson disagrees. “They talk to the people as if they are going to help them. [But] it’s not about serving the community.” He sees it as further proof that the City is using public streets for its own financial gain, which it can turn into political power. “It’s a voting machine,” he said, “to keep them in power.”
   Bortfeld said many factors are considered before a business can deploy the red-vested valet parkers, and the City is not likely to revoke Mitsubishi’s permit. “That’s not going to happen just because neighboring businesses are protesting.”
   Given that, and Kidson’s unwillingness to enter into the requisite permit and review process in order to execute his plans for a new, larger Busy Bee, any change seems unlikely.
   But, in a city that’s lost so much of its history, there’s some solace in that, as Busy Bee in its current incarnation is a vivid visual symbol of Santa Monica’s past — small, independent and personal.