Pandemic, prices and corporate competition lead to another Kitsap lumber yard's closure

Kitsap County is losing its last locally owned lumber store. After more than 40 years of serving generations of customers with individualized care, Kitsap Lumber and Hardware on National Avenue in Bremerton will close by the end of December, succumbing to competition with corporate hardware stores and supply complications lingering from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We're getting rid of this about 15 years earlier than we wanted to,” owner Shane Hickey said. Hickey worked at Kitsap Lumber for about 17 years before buying the business seven years ago to keep it afloat when previous owner Chris Funke retired.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck and the nation went into lockdown, Kitsap Lumber was busy. Customers were coming in for project supplies, stuck at home with a few extra dollars in their pockets from stimulus checks.

But in 2021 lumber prices skyrocketed, from $300 to more than $1,600 per 1,000 board feet, according to the Seattle Times. That’s when Hickey decided that the store wouldn’t carry as much lumber, as he didn’t want to be stuck with a plethora of plywood if the lumber market dropped and customers flooded back to corporate stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s, which can be more aggressive in adjusting prices.

“It's really hard to turn people's opinions away from Home Depot and Lowe's and that their prices are cheaper than privately owned small businesses,” Hickey said. “You get a much better product through the small businesses … but when you're dealing with corporations everywhere around you with very, very deep pockets that can withstand this type of thing, you're always going to lose.”

Kitsap Lumber’s customer base began to drop significantly, Hickey said, and the store wasn’t able to reintegrate lumber into the store solidly as interest rates rose.

“The big ticket items, we just basically had to stop doing because of cost and then the customer base really kind of fell off the map — people just weren't shopping here,” Hickey said. “We couldn't really recover from not having the lumber that we needed, so we started hitting the home decor and the hardware a lot more heavily because that's what it seemed like people were spending their money on.”

But ultimately, revenue had dropped for the lumber store and their employee roster dropped to three workers from 20 pre-pandemic, Hickey said. “If you can't support your employees, there's no point in running the business.”

The final nail in the coffin for Kitsap Lumber was when the owner of the store's building decided to sell, Hickey said. The current property owners had been good to Kitsap Lumber and lenient with rent, he said, but Hickey feared that the business couldn’t weather potential increases in its lease. Its departure follows other closures or sales of longtime locally owned lumber yards over the past decade, like Bremerton's Parker Lumber, which shut down in 2010 after nearly 50 years, or Kingston Lumber, sold to a holding company in 2019 after nearly 70 years of operation.

Now Hickey is hoping to liquidate the store. Kitsap Lumber is featuring a 25%-off sale on everything inside. Hickey is trying to sell some items online, which he might continue to do after closing.

“I have a ton of memories here — I can't pick out just one of just my team working together and the laughs and the jokes and the fun that we've had with the customers,” Hickey said. “We're hearing a lot of stories about how people in their fifties and sixties are coming in here saying how their dad and their grandfather used to bring them into the store and shop 40 years ago.

“It's been very supportive and very sad,” Hickey said. “We're getting a lot of support from the clients that have stuck through us and we're seeing a lot of new faces that we haven't seen in years come in and shop now because we are going out of business.”

As Kitsap Lumber departs as the county’s last privately owned lumber yard, Hickey hopes customers will take their business to Mitchell Lumber Co. in Belfair, a longtime local business just over the border in Mason County.

“Shop small, shop local,” Hickey said. “Give them the business that they deserve — they've been here a long time. Because, it's really challenging for a small business to keep up with all of these corporations.”

Mitchell Lumber Co. is faring well and has weathered the COVID-19 pandemic and lumber price spikes, said Andy Mitchell, a third-generation owner of the family-owned business.

Because a small business has less corporate oversight and the fact that a large base of Mitchell Lumber Co.’s customers are custom homebuilders, the small business can be more “adaptable and versatile,” Mitchell said. “Being able to pivot really lends itself well to the custom home because, well, it's custom — everything's a one-off build and you can't get what you need from a Lowe's or a Home Depot with special ordering.”

And, when the COVID-19 pandemic happened and lumber prices rose, the business got lucky in that many of their builder customers already had their permits and decided it would be better to eat the lumber cost instead of delaying their projects, Mitchell said.

“We've never set up our business to try and compete on price and be the cheapest — our client base over 50 years was not expecting us to be, never has expected us to be, the cheapest because we give them value in other ways, in service and quality,” Mitchell said.

In the meantime, Hickey is contemplating his next steps. After Kitsap Lumber closes in December, he plans to take a couple of months off and finish projects and remodels around the house that he didn’t have the time for before.

“After that, I don't know — I have to find a new job somewhere,” Hickey said. “What's sad is our knowledge base is going to be lost (after the store closes). … I could probably go work for another lumberyard hardware store in the area. That's what I have to figure out is, do I want to continue to do this and stay in the industry, or do I want to start something new, something that is more of a passion of mine.”

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Kitsap Lumber and Hardware to close after more than 40 years