Chasin' Chickens, and the other rare W-FAILs....

The Rochester newspaper chronicler's of Things Past brought up a sad anniversary the other day. October 5, 2005 was when the Wegmans organization announced that it was leaving the home improvement business and closing its then 14-store chain of Chase-Pitkin home repair stores. "Chasin' Chickens" was their pet name among members of Eleanor's family, and years after their demise, that still sticks in my head.

I still see the occasional reference to them on Shoppers Club cards on customers ahead of me in line. I long ago replaced mine, but being an eternal pack rat, I still have the one from back then:



(Don't try using that number for anything; the card expired in 1993;)

This weekend's piece simply noted that Wegmans attributed the closing to an " inability to successfully compete with giant home centers such as Home Depot — which entered the Rochester market in 1996 — and Lowe’s. Chase-Pitkin became part of Wegmans in 1974 and had 10 stores in the Rochester area and nearly 400 full-time employees. Wegmans said the closings would allow the company to concentrate on expanding its food business."

At least two others of the eventual 14 former stores were in the Buffalo area.  The one closest to us opened across the parking lot from their early Alberta Drive store- on the footprint of the former General Cinema Boulevard III multiplex.  We gave it plenty of business over the years, including, most bigly, my bringing home a small pin oak tree to fill a hole in our back yard. We named him Dave, and he's now one of the tallest trees on the whole block.

Another site traced this chain back to more than half a century before the Wegman family opened their first store:

The company's roots began with the Chase Brothers Nursery, which was founded in 1857 by brothers Ethan, Lewis, and Martin Chase. William Pitkin, who married Lewis Chase's daughter, joined the Chase brothers in their company. Pitkin served as mayor of Rochester from 1845 to 1846, and was a descendant (by another marriage) of Nathaniel Rochester. 

The Pitkin in the name still lives on with a street long named for him in the city's cultural east end.  A commenter added this to the story, which sounds like the Wegman way of doing business:

Wegman negotiated for a couple years to buy Chase-Pitkin, and when negotiations broke down, Wegmans opened their first home repair store in the then former grocery store on Spencerport Rd and Howard Rd. By then Chase Pitkin had suffered economic downturn, and Wegmans bought on Wegman's terms about a year after opening Wegmans Home Repair Center, and rebranded the stores.

Since Wegmans was on a program of doubling footprint of all their grocery stores, new Chase Pitkin stores opened as empty grocery stores became available. The Ridgemont store was the exception, it opened in the store formerly occupied by Woolworths. 

As the former Chase-Pitkins closed, the reverse phenomenon occurred; Wegmans, needing even bigger stores than ever, tore down the hardware building on Alberta Drive, turning it into their largest Northtowns superstore. (The original Alberta Wegmans, just opened when I moved here for law school, became the Ashley Furniture building that Eleanor worked at for many years.)  The other one I remember here was across from the Galleria, and the Wegmans eventually abandoned that entire location, with both the C-P and the grocery store there closing sometime in the ought's.

Pretty much all of their stores now, both new and renovated, are huuuuge. The one outlier, preserved in amber from an earlier time, is the one on Fairport Road in Easta Rach, which looks Straight Outta Sixties Still:



I doubt they would have had the real estate or the desire to make their Chases-Pitkin as big, and that's where the decision to shut it down came from.  Could they have retained their niche? In Buffalo, in addition to the small, True Value or Ace-affiliated neighborhood shops, two chains have survived the arrival of the big blue and orange boxes. I was in one of them yesterday: it's called Valu, has been based here since the 60s and before the Wegman Invasion, and has settled nicely into its spot as a Not As Big A Box.  Their manager spent 10 minutes with me trying to figure out whether I needed a new $10 part or a battery replacement for my existing one; and their cashier was friendly and reminded everyone of what obscure National This or That Day it was.  (The other's called Hector's, and it's both smaller-box and lower-rent, but it seems to have its devotees.)

Two thoughts on why Chase-Pitkin couldn't have managed in this mess: My theory is that the Wegman culture simply doesn't allow them to be, and to be known as, anything other than The Best at whatever they get into.  Valu may be able to thrive on being the Smaller Box, but the Wegman family usually can't or won't.  The other theory, advanced with merit by a Rochester friend, is that they well might have maintained that role in Rochester and even here, but they would not have been able to keep the economies of scale as they moved into new markets with a grocery name everybody loves but an older affiliated DIY name that would've made people go, huh?  Strip malls have been littered with the former locations of hardware chains, beloved in their original markets, that got too big for their 2 x 4's (Hechingers and Rickels are two that come to mind).

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Wegmans rarely gets things wrong; when they do, you can usually figure out why, and they are usually quick to cut their losses.  Here are a few tried-and-false attempts I recall them taking shots at in my time shopping with them:

* In-store dry cleaning.  There were never any complaints about the prices or the service, but it was a bad use of valuable front-end space to service only your richest and bitchiest of customers.  Danny didn't get to where he is letting somebody else's shirts sit for days in plastic bags waiting for their owners to show up and pay. This experiment lasted maybe a year.

* Video departments.  Their stores were among the first to compete with Blockbuster for this service, and they were way ahead of the curve in getting out of the business once VCRs died and even smaller-space DVDs were supplanted by streaming.  Now, a Redbox or two in the vestibule is the only remaining trace.

* W-PET.  You can still see vestiges of these at some of their stores dating to around the 90s. When the premium pet food brands refused to sell to supermarkets, Danny said, Fine!, and opened supposedly separate store-within-a-stores to get access to the IAMS and Eukanubas.  Whether they failed on their own or the manufacturers just caved (eventually they even allowed Wally World to carry their fancy stuff), these were W-GONE in a hurry.

* Drive-through pharmacies. I've only seen one or two stores where they tried this. Um, no. Come inside. Mmmmmm it smells so GOOD!

* That's T.H.E. Ticket. If anyone would have the moxie to take on the evil monopoly of Ticketmonster, it'd be these guys.  They rolled out their own in-store ticketing service with a fair amount of fanfare, but it never made a dent in the market power of the three-headed force of seller (TM)/promoter (Live Nation) and media backer (Clear Channel) all keeping all the good stuff away from their terminals.  The service still exists, but only for October hayrides and very local specialty events; try finding anything other than a stray reference to it on their website, and don't ask what the T.H.E. stands for, because I sure as H.E.L.L couldn't tell you;)

It's also worth noting the things they've given up or restricted, not out of profit concerns but out of real ones. Wegmans was one of the first major retailers to stop selling tobacco products, and they've shut down the fraud-magnet money delivery services like Western Union and Moneygram that little old ladies kept using to send their life savings to scammers in Nigeria.

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So if you're shopping in Alberta or Hylan Drive, and catch the slightest whiff of linseed oil or see some sawdust, stop for a second and remember almost 150 years of lost history. Go on. Don't be chicken;)