Garrettsville – E & H Hardware prides itself in being responsive to its customers. In the case of its Garrettsville location, that means converting a storage room into a power tools department, including a high-performance automatic chainsaw sharpener.
Lee Martinek has worked for E & H Hardware for 25 years, previously in Cortland and Warren. She came to help manage the Garrettsville hardware store with Casey Everett at the Garfield Plaza three years ago. She has observed that each store reflects its individual community. Certain products fly off the shelves in one community, but don’t even move in another.
It didn’t take long for her to notice that this clientele purchases more chain saws and related equipment than at most other locations. In fact, an authorized STIHL Dealer, Garrettsville’s E & H Hardware won the Stihl sales award in 2017 for its high volume of sales. What’s more, Garrettsville customers request more sharpening services for their chainsaw chains than at any other E & H location.
Martinek realized the Garrettsville customer base is dominated by landscapers, residential woodstove users, tree trimmers and other woodsmen compared to most neighboring communities. Her evidence was the backlog of chainsaw chains in the service department, translating to month-long wait times for hand-sharpening service during peak season. When Martinek ran the numbers, she found that Garrettsville customers request — on average — 720 chain sharpenings annually. That compares to only 200 sharpening requests at the Middlefield store and 120 in Newton Falls.
“The Garrettsville store blows away every other Ace Hardware in terms of requests for chain sharpenings,” Martinek said. “It takes time to sharpen a chain by hand properly, and local customers rely on our service technicians Mike Brookover and Wes Hauck — who has worked here for 40 years — to sharpen their chains. Some guys walk in here with a bucketful of chains to sharpen while others bring in one to a dozen at a time. Wes just couldn’t keep up with the demand and we couldn’t hold people up for that long.”
So to better serve the woodsmen of Garrettsville, the local hardware store cleared out an old storage room in the rear and stocked it with Stihl and other woodcutting and power equipment, including a Franzen automated chain sharpening machine.
Manufactured in Germany, the machine sharpens a typical 20-inch chain (both teeth and rakers) in five minutes, compared to the 15 minutes required by hand. Once a service technician first cleans and inspects the chain, he then calibrates it on the machine. When it’s set, the machine does the sharpening while the technician is freed up to serve a customer or do an oil change, for example. Customers appreciate the sharpening-while-they-wait rather than having to drop off their chains and waiting indefinitely.
The power tool sales department is dominated by Stihl products but also carries Craftsman, Husqvarna, Smithfield and Toro brands of chain saws, trimmers, blowers, pressure washers, mowers, generators, torpedo heaters and more equipment.
Owned by the Buehler family in Wooster, E & H has 24 hardware stores in locations throughout Ohio. Formerly owned by the local Everett family since the 1940s, Garrettsville Hardware was purchased by E & H in 2013, at which time the Do It Best store was converted to an Ace Hardware. Casey Everett and Martinek share management responsibilities now at the store. Martinek previously worked in the Warren and Cortland E & H Ace stores before coming to Garrettsville three years ago. Everett says he has “officially” worked at the store for 31 years; “unofficially” for probably 51 years!
Local woodsmen are encouraged to bring their dull chains in to E&H Ace Hardware in Garrettsville and take advantage of a current coupon offer for one free chain sharpening on the Franzen automated machine.
