For Carl Best, the challenge is to maintain a tradition of service at Best’s Hardware & Mill Supplies in Floral Park that goes back 92 years and spans three generations.
“We don’t have everything, but we have a lot of stuff,” Best said. “We have more knowledge than any other store in the area.”
A consumer-oriented hardware business, the store at 406 Jericho Turnpike in Floral Park offers cleaning supplies, electrical supplies, gardening equipment, tools, paint and, according to Best, “more nuts, bolts and screw than anybody else around us.”
Best, 62, also said he can match prices on products from Home Depot or Ace Hardware because of his lower overhead.
Best said that after 40 years in the business profit is not what motivates him these days.
“I enjoy helping people. I enjoy a lot of challenges, but mainly helping people,” he said. “I’m not in it for the money. If I was, I would have left a long time ago.”
Much has changed in the business over the last 40 years, such as the computers that became part of the store’s operations when it was still located in New Hyde Park in 1989. He said the computers help him search for items not in stock that he can order for customers.
What hasn’t changed, he said, is his attitude in helping customers.
On one recent morning, a customer asking about the widely advertised pocket hose, which Best stocks, was advised against buying it. The ends leak, Best said, telling the customer he’s had several of the hoses returned since he started selling them.
Best’s friendly black Newfoundland, Sirius, barked in seeming approval. It was an interaction his grandfather Joseph would have been proud to witness.
The business was started in Floral Park by his grandfather in 1921 as J.F. Best Hardware and Housewares in an age before chain-store competition.
It relocated in 1932, adding garden supplies, locksmithing, paints, toys and housewares.
His father, Joseph, lived above the store in an 11-room apartment with his two brothers and two sisters. And they were expected to scramble when his grandfather needed a hand.
“He’d holler upstairs, ‘I need somebody to help me’,” Best said.
Carl said he still has some of the original display cabinets that were in his grandfather’s store.
Carl’s father took over the business, but in 1960, it was temporarily shuttered when Jericho Turnpike was widened. His grandfather died the following year.
“It sort of killed him,” Carl said.
The change in the thoroughfare prompted his father to move the business to New Hyde Park, just east of New Hyde Park Road, and Carl and his brother Joe were expected to help out.
At age 10, Carl started working occasionally in the store. By the time he reached age 14, he was coming in to clean on Saturdays on a regular basis.
“By the time I was 17, I knew half the stock because I cleaned it out,” he said.
In those days, 75 percent of the business was in mill supplies, providing machine parts for what Best said was a vibrant manufacturing hub on Denton Avenue. Castro Convertible, Asher Candy and Zoe Chemical – which he said used to blow up every five years – were among the businesses there.
“Our mainstay was industry,” he said.
Best left the business for a while, attending college for a few years and then working in boat yards on the east end of Long Island for a few more years.
“I’m a jack of all trades,” he said.
But his father, who was having physical problems, convinced him to come back to the business in the mid-’70s.
He ultimately bought the business from his father and moved it to its current location in 1995.
Parking, he explained, was inadequate in the New Hyde Park location, and the store had to be remodeled as the business changed.
“We changed our modus operandi for homeowners because industry had left the area,” he said. “We’ve changed in the way people perceive us. You have to change with the times.”
Now the machine parts business is about 25 percent of the business Best Hardware does. And the emphasis is on helping the customer – and occasionally confessing ignorance.
“We know what we’re talking about. If we don’t know, we say, ‘I don’t know’,” Best said. “We’re honest people. And we offer fair prices.”
