I’m sort of enjoying getting the daily business updates from Mike Fitts, which I just signed up for last week. I cited Mike’s work yesterday, and now I come to share some sad news from 5 Points — Hiller Hardware’s going away.
An excerpt from Mike’s report:
An iconic business is heading out of Five Points. Hiller Hardware is planning to leave its longtime location at Blossom and Harden streets, making way for a new branch of BB&T bank.
If the deal goes through, BB&T will tear down the existing structure as part of a 30-year lease on the property, said Merritt McHaffie, executive director of the Five Points Association. The plans will be discussed at the May 5 meeting of the city’s Design Development and Review Commission….
Columbia City Councilwoman Belinda Gergel, who represents Five Points, said she’s been a longtime Hiller customer, buying a wide variety of items, such as rakes or candles….
Hiller has been at its Five Points location since 1951 and in business in Columbia for almost 70 years. A Lady Street location closed during streetscaping there several years ago….
He went on to report that the family business MIGHT open elsewhere, but that’s by no means certain.
The problem is the big-box hardware retailers, and I must confess that I am part of the problem because I’m a regular customer at Lowe’s. My wife, on the other hand, used to always go out of her way to do business with Ace Hardwarehouse in the Park Lane shopping center in Cayce — which closed last year.
That was another local landmark. It was also a prized advertising customer of The State. Once, years ago, a previous publisher decided that we non-business types on the senior staff needed to shadow some ad sales reps just to learn what they did. The rep I was assigned to took me first to the Hardwarehouse, where the owner or manager was so into his newspaper ads that he would put them together himself, pasting bits of file art onto posterboard at a drawing table in his office.
Yeah, the newspaper makes big bucks from big boxes (although not as big as in the past). But an important part of the community that has been dying and taking newspapers along with it consists of businesses like Hardwarehouse and Hiller. And it’s a shame to see them go.
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While politicians play god and attempt to control the economy and “create new green jobs”, existing jobs are being destroyed in the process.
Big government doesn’t like small business.
The politicians like big business because they can extort big “contributions from them. They can control thousands of employees through one big business.
Hiller Hardware and other family hardware businesses are victims of capricious urban redevelopment projects and so many customer who only shop on price at China Mart. Hiller is the only source in Columbia for many items on its shelves. An income tax system which counts all new inventory as income if it is not sold by year end, is a huge barrier to specialty shops like that.
Aw, say it ain’t so. I hoped it wouldn’t happen even though I figured it had to. Five Points won’t be the same.
SCNative is definitely Lee Muller. He’s an expert at everything (like Lee). He repeats the words Obama, fascist, sterilization, socialist, communist, big government, Muslim, and birth certificate over and over again in varying order in every post (like Lee). If you disagree with him, he says you lack imagination, intellect, and substance (like Lee).
But here’s the clincher: he’s the last poster on every thread, every time. Just like Lee.
I have an interest in Hiller Hardware because I lived 2 blocks away for years. I bought my first centerfire rifle there in 1967.
And when I apply words like “fascist,socialist, communist”, you can be it is right. That’s why you don’t challenge it. You know it’s the truth. You are ashamed how many of your political beliefs coincide with famous political failures.
Obama wrote in his autobiography about his being raised as a Muslim and communist.
No one has yet seen Obama’s birth certificate. 250 Army officers are suing for him to prove his authority.
Yes, SCnative is Lee.
But you know what — I just finally figured out who KP is, based on the registration e-mail I received. Boy, do I feel dumb for not knowing. (Maybe you thought I knew all along, but I didn’t.)
Well hell, Brad, I’m outed. I knew I shouldn’t have filled that stupid thing out — truthfully, at least.
Scarier than that, though — I wonder if Lee and I have been neighbors in the past. I lived a few blocks from Hiller Hardware myself (I never bought a rifle there, though, only light bulbs and stuff like that). I think that makes me an expert.
I offered before, Brad, to change my screen name.
Just post the instructions.
If it bothers you so much, why don’t you use your full name and get “KP” and the others to do the same?
Obama proposes deficit spending 24 times as large as the New Deal.
My name is right there at the top of the blog (he said, in the same tone that Sean Connery used as he tapped his badge with his nightstick in “The Untouchables”).
I don’t know how to tell you to change it. I guess you edit your profile. I think I know how to do it from my end. Want me to?
The reason I keep mentioning it is that I hate to see anybody regress. Like I’d hate to see Doug Ross go back to just “Doug.” I see people using full names as progress.
Maybe, with you and me both using our full names, it will put enough moral pressure on KP to come out from the shadows…
By the way, I just figured out how to make my own profile display my full name on comments, so I think I know how to do yours.
I didn’t set my profile up originally. The guy who was nice enough to set up the blog for me did.
Well, let’s try again.
Gotta go to Hiller and buy a few things before Bob Coble hits it with a wrecking ball.
Bob Coble had nothing to do with this. Geez.
I wanted to buy everything I could at Hiller Hardware, but got very frustrated many years ago because they often didn’t have what I needed or were closed when I needed it. This started long before the streetscaping project, which has been long gone, btw. Hampton says he can make more $ as a landlord than as a retailer and that makes sense–that was a point made repeatedly when the Kenny’s project was up–pretty soon all the owners of the nondescript low-rise retail buildings comprising “echt Five Points” will clue in to the value of going up and a taller building would not be out of place at all. Now what do we have on the site?
It seems to me that this is a case of the magical unseen hand of the market at work–a higher monetary use’s winning out over the sentimental value of the corner hardware store. Hampton says in The State today that he is tired of retail hours and retail dollars and can make a lot more money as a landlord to a bank. That is, there is greater economic utility to the land as a bank building than as a hardware store.
Do I like it? Not particularly, but it is nothing more than pure T capitalism.
Bob Coble did not have anything to do directly with Hiller Hardware, but he sure made a mess of the Kenny’s Auto site, with a poorly-conceived deal that fell through. Violent crime in Five Points goes unsolved, and unreported by the Coble News.
Columbia is not friendly to business. Retail is dead in Columbia. No one wants to move back downtown to live. Devine Street business struggles to hang on, but they are on their own in Columbia. Don’t expect any leadership out of City Hall.
Do I like it? Not particularly, but it is nothing more than pure T capitalism.
Kathryn-
Truer words were never spoken! Economies of scale and advancing technologies drive business today and taller buildings and Wal-Mart win out. What they lack in charm they make up for in efficiency. Hiller was a great convenient stop in the neighborhood but it was a little more expensive and had a limited selection. If people did not see some advantage to big box retailers they would not go there.
Local retail has to find a niche, which includes not selling vanilla commodity items head-to-head with China Mart.
They have to carry quality US and European merchandise, by manufacturers who refuse to market through the big box stores, or at least the upper end product lines which the big boxes do not want.
Local business also must offer product knowledge and customer service, which the national retailers cannot and do not do.
Local customers have to support local business, too.
Local and state government has to refrain from granting tax breaks to subidize the urban sprawl of the China Marts.
Yes, there’s no question that we’re seeing the market at work here. It’s a shame, but that’s what’s happening.
Ditto with newspapers. The underlying business model shifted, and there’s just not enough revenue for newspapers to do what they used to do.
And Lee, of all the things you cited as to how a Mom and Pop can distinguish itself, the main one is service.
Unfortunately, that’s often not enough. Lourie’s is a good example. Fantastic service, and quality merchandise. But it couldn’t last.
Lee is not correct when he says “no one wants to move back downtown to live.” Depends what you call “downtown.” Yeah, sure they’ve overbuilt on condos (for now) in the Vista and even Main Street downtown, but in a city as small as Columbia, living in single-family free-standing houses in parts of Shandon, Old Shandon, or even West Columbia could qualify as living “downtown” when you are a 5-minute drive from the State House. In any case, I’m thinking that rents must have risen for many of these independent stores, which must have something to do with the increased desirability of center Columbia for the long term. But, of course, if no store can afford to rent these spaces, perhaps the rents will come back down.
Actually this same question of big-box or chain stores vs. independents has transformed a lot of Manhattan in the last 15 years, too. Manhattanites used to vow that K-Mart, Barnes and Noble, Home Depot, or malls of any kind would never sully their island, but that too has come to pass especially on the Upper West Side and Union Square and Times Square. The malls may be a little more vertical than horizontal, but they’ve gotten a foothold. Perhaps 5 Points is headed that direction as well.
I have lived in Columbia, off and on, since 1972.
I have been coming downtown since they had horses and a farmers’ market on Assembly Street, and Main Street was 100% occupied by specialty clothing stores, bookstores like Gittman’s, and restaurants like Cogburns and Laniers.
Politicians sold out the downtowns to the their real estate buddies who put them in office. It makes sense to develop shopping malls vertically, like the ones in Chicago or New York, or the one in Buckhead with Target. But that requires a much more sophisticated team of developers, architects and engineers than it does to scrape off some dirt on the edge of town and build a sprawling one-story cookie-cutter shopping center.
In the early 1970s, IIRC 1973, there was an international conference held in Columbia on urban redevelopment, with well-known economists, developers, and urban planners from all over the nation, Italy, and Scandinavia. Local architects attended, but I saw not one local city or county employ there, no one from the Chamber of Commerce.
The Happy Bookseller is another example. Great customer service. They just couldn’t carry the variety of Barnes and Noble. But, despite its size, B&N has knowledgeable employees dedicated to customer service so being large does not necessarily entail a lack of quality.
Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million are not like Wal-Mart ( the largest bookseller). B&N and BAM offer a huge variety of books and magazines.
Wal-Mart offers only the best sellers, and tries to push down paper and binding quality. There is no customer service with books – totally self-service.
A problem with any small retailer, and especially a bookstore with quality books which it does not turn over as often, is the tax rules which count your increased inventory as profit. If you want to put your profits back into your business, you have to do it with after-tax money. Wal-Mart’s inventory is very small relative to its sales volume. The other big retailers with large inventory return it to the distributors, fire sale it, or remainder it off in order to reduce their tax exposure, and then reload the shelves for the next year.
A problem with any small retailer, and especially a bookstore with quality books which it does not turn over as often, is the tax rules which count your increased inventory as profit.
Uh, what?
The increase in your inventory or net assets, is treated the same as an increase in net assets due to cash. You cannot just plough your profits back into any business and write it off as an expense. Basically, a business must borrow money to finance what they had the money to pay for in cash, due to tax valuations.
That is one reform business desperately needs – the choice to expense investments as the occur, or to expense them in line with their depreciation.
If they were expensing inventory, taxes would be recouped at its real value when they sell it individually, in bulk, or in the entire business. That is the sensible and fair way it should be done.
The increase in your inventory or net assets, is treated the same as an increase in net assets due to cash. You cannot just plough your profits back into any business and write it off as an expense. Basically, a business must borrow money to finance what they had the money to pay for in cash, due to tax valuations.
That is one reform business desperately needs – the choice to expense investments as the occur, or to expense them in line with their depreciation.
If they were expensing inventory, taxes would be recouped at its real value when they sell it individually, in bulk, or in the entire business. That is the sensible and fair way it should be done.
I couldn’t quite follow what you were trying to say in your first paragraph. What are you saying is the disadvantage of buying inventory with your profits as opposed to financing?
In your next paragraph — why should businesses be allowed to expense inventory immediately? If they did that, they would get the tax benefit of the expense up front and get the added benefit of deferring revenue until the inventory was sold. That seems to be a pretty obvious violation of accounting principle to me.
It should be up to the businessman to decide how he wants to expense and depreciate his expenses, captial equipment and inventory.
When he sells it off, he will have a profit or a loss. If he expensed it up front and has a loss, he already wrote it off his taxes on the front end. If he has a profit, it could be due to increased quantity of his inventory, or the increased value of it. He would pay a tax when he actually realizes the profit, instead of when the government imagines that he was going to make it on the front end.
Even better, we need to abolish the corporate income tax, the tax on dividends and the tax on capitql gains to investors.
Ok, well I disagree that you should just be able to make up whatever accounting rules you want to follow.
But I do agree that it is silly to tax the same dollar of income at the corporate level and then again when it is actually distributed to the owner.
That’s why we have C Corporations.
The standards of accounting permit you to choose several different methods of writing off you expenses and the depreciation of assets and inventory. That does not mean, “just be able to make up whatever rules you want to follow.”
Right now, we have the situation of following good accounting procedures to correctly report the statements of the business, and another method of accounting required for the IRS, and sometimes different ones for several different states.
We are getting way off the story of Hiller and Five Points, but these issues are backbreakers for small busineses.
Well, you seem to be saying that you should just be able to expense all your inventory when you purchase it. That is what I mean when I say you shouldn’t “just be able to make up whatever rules you want to follow.”
Are you unaware that accountants operate under accepted standards of how to value assets?
By the way, did y’all see the news in The State a couple of days back, that Hiller could move to the site of the other local hardware store I lamented in my post? My wife, a huge fan of the Hardwarehouse, thinks that would be awesome.
Are you unaware that accountants operate under accepted standards of how to value assets?
Go back and reread what I have written and you will find nothing that suggests I don’t know that there are generally accepted accounting principles. I know your reading comprehension skills are not that bad so stop being an ass.
My only point is that there is a reason inventory is not expensed in the way you seem to want it to be — you know, those “accepted standards”.
Now I think I’ve filled this post up enough with this pointless discussion.
The reason the IRS considers inventory as a income is in order to increase tax liablilties.
Letting business owners declare expenses and income as they actually occur would be more realistic, and for fair.
The real solution is to abolish all income taxes, and replace it with a 6% federal sales tax.
Abolish local property taxes and state income taxes and limit all states to a 4% sales tax, which is more than necessary for all essential. legitimate services. We know that, because so many states ran so well for years under just such a tax system.
The IRS does not consider inventory as “income.” I don’t know where you are pulling that from, but it makes no sense.
The IRS treats inventory the same way it is treated under accepted standards of financial accounting. The IRS did not make the rules just to squeeze a few more dollars out of business.
Inventory is matched with the revenue it produces and expensed in the period that that revenue is earned. That’s a pretty basic accounting principle whether you like it or not.