Ken Nelson, who’s co-owned the Rural Supply Hardware store on South Santa Cruz Avenue for decades, had already begun the liquidation sale when he heard the good news.
The party that had been trying to purchase the business from them before the landlord decided to put the property up for sale were stepping-in to purchase the building.
“We really didn’t want to leave an empty store,” Nelson said. “It’s been a lot of ups and downs.”
Nelson and his brother Tim had been leasing the address since 1995. This was renegotiated a time or two, but the basic terms remained constant.
As Nelson approached his 70th birthday, he had begun discussing with his brother the option of selling the Ace Hardware location.
“We’ve been talking for a couple of years,” he said. “We didn’t really move into sale mode until early summer.”
As they began to look at what that would involve, including updating the lease, their landlord elected to hire a commercial real estate broker.
“That’s when it started to fall apart,” Nelson said.
The landlord decided to sell the business and the Nelsons were stuck trying to get rid of a company in the struggling retail sector that didn’t have a long-term lease in place.
Thankfully, Richard Crevelt and Stig Nybo, who have Ace Hardware stores in Portola Valley, Aptos and Los Altos, were able to come up with the financing to buy the property.
“They said, ‘Stop your clearance sale. We’re going to buy the building after all,’” Nelson recalled. “I was shocked. Because we were already in closeout mode for a whole month.”
Crevelt and Nybo are the same people who’d seemed most interested in taking over Rural Supply, even before the pandemic.
The store has long been an important errand point for folks in the Santa Cruz Mountains and on the south end of town.
Customer Bev Batson, who tells of her family’s own storied history with the Ace Hardware brand in the Midwest, says it’s sad the Nelsons won’t be operating the storefront any longer.
“It’s a great business,” she said. “Change is really hard.”
But Nelson says Rural Supply will be in good hands.
“I feel very confident that they’re going to run a good hardware store,” he said. “It’s not like we’re putting someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing in charge.”
But that doesn’t necessarily mean leaving it behind is easy.
“Because we’ve been here so long,” he said. “I’m trying not to think so much about it.”
Recently, he’s been remembering about the time when the previous owner, who recently passed away, handed the business off to them.
“It was the same type of thing,” Nelson said. “So, we think about him a lot.”
Standing behind the till with his dog, ahead of the end-of-November date when paperwork was set to be finalized, things hadn’t quite sunk in.
“The day I drive away it will probably hit me,” he said. “We’re going to miss a lot of people.”
