A longtime family-run business in Barrie will soon be celebrating a century of service.
And selling just about anything you can imagine.
Robinson Hardware, which will be 100 years young next year, was a Dunlop Street hardware mainstay in two different locations.
The first, at the corner of Maple Avenue and Dunlop Street (the building still stands), was opened in July 1923 by Charlie Robinson, whose grandson Jim is now at the helm.
Business was so good — at one point Barrie had five downtown hardware stores — that the Robinsons expanded and moved to 31 Dunlop St. E., in 1931, where they remained for more than 65 years providing tools, equipment and materials for just about any purpose.
Perhaps some dynamite for that special project, or nails packed in wooden kegs?
“Back then, the hardware store was where you bought pretty much everything. They wouldn’t sell any food, but just about anything else,” Jim tells BarrieToday of the store’s heyday when his father Alvin ran the store.
He passed the reins to Jim and his older brother John (who is easing into retirement) who have had nieces and nephews helping out over the years.
“It’s kind of a family affair. They’ve all worked at the store at one point or another, whether it’s a summer job or something else,” Jim says.
The second location, just steps from the Five Points, was witness to a different kind of downtown many years ago.
“I remember my dad saying that when he worked at the store when he was younger, Saturday night was kind of a social night. Everybody would come into town and the stores would be open,” Jim says.
But that was a long time ago.
When the decision was made to relocate to a little plaza in the city’s east end in 1998, Barrie’s retail landscape was changing.
“It was a good thing,” the store owner says of the move. “It was a result of the changing market in Barrie, with all the big box stores coming in. When we moved, we actually consolidated and reorganized.
“We had to adapt, find our niche markets and focus in on service.”
That seems to be working for them, with an expansion to the Penetanguishene Road/Blake Street location — known as Robinson Home Hardware since 2005 — of up to 11,000 square feet.
Fun factoid: Over the years, the business has often been incorrectly referred to, even in print advertisements from 80 or 90 years ago.
“It’s funny,” Jim says. “It was actually my mother who always liked to correct people. She never liked the possessive spelling of Robinson Hardware. She never cared for that. She would correct people and say it was Robinson Hardware.”
Regardless, the store continues.
“We know most of our customers on a first-name basis,” he says, adding that some of them are multi-generational.
“We felt fairly confident that (the 1998 move) would work for us because we already knew a lot of our customers were from the east end. But we were kind of shocked when we still had customers from the Sunnidale Road area and even Allandale who still came to visit us," Jim says.
