For Now, Details Can Wait
Over an early morning soda at his favorite restaurant, he talked about his plans. Tomorrow morning, he will go to work for someone else for the first time in a quarter-century. Just down the street, because he loves the neighborhood, Mr. Goldman starts a new life as the general manager of Anderson Plywood for owner John Erenson. He is not sure precisely what his duties will be. “Ask me tomorrow,” he said, jauntily. What is crucial is that he will have Saturdays and Sundays off for the first time since he was half his age.
A Man and His Passion
Mr. Goldman’s passion for his beloved hardware store was part of Culver City business lore. The store and the native Chicagoan breathed, celebrated and suffered in unison. The two of them were a team. Divorce, no matter how attained, sometimes is insufficient to extinguish the light that illuminates a relationship. The organic link that bound Mr. Goldman to his store as husband and business turned out to be virtually unbreakable. When Mr. Goldman moved on three years ago, the externalities dropped into place. He said the appropriate words. He meant them. But he felt lighter than he had before. At first, he was not sure why. The explanation turned out to be that his heart refused to budge from the almost-holy grounds of the hardware store. A 25,000-piece inventory. A guy can get lost for days in such a paradise. The question was put to Mr. Goldman. Compared to the hardware store, how good of a fit was Batteries Plus? Keep in mind that one of Mr. Goldman’s most intimate friends, throughout his life, has been the under-rated notion of sentiment. You doubt it? When the sensitive Mr. Goldman showed his guest into his favorite eatery this morning, he asked what the guest considered an inordinately thoughtful question: Which side of the table do you prefer? Since the casual bill of fare merely was soda, the question was the more amazing. And now to the question of making the mental transition, scaling down from a large and throbbing hardware store to a more quiet enterprise. “I missed the store,” he admitted. “Getting off the ground was harder than I thought. I really thought with my industrial business background in hardware, that it would move faster than it did. In the hardware store, we stocked 25,000 items. In the battery store, we stocked 1200. With just 1200 items, I could tell you in any given stock how many I had on hand.” Mr. Goldman acknowledged that the question about which store hew as closer to, was meritorious. “It just wasn’t the same at the battery store,” he said. There are rational reasons. ”I am older,” he said. “The old get-up-and-go just isn’t there to go out and hustle the way I used to. So I decided to sell. And the question was, what was I going to do next?” The last move was 30 yards. This one, to Anderson Plywood, is a half-mile. “For the first time in over 25 years, I will have a boss, and I am looking forward to it,” Mr. Goldman said. “I think (Mr. Erenson) is looking forward to it, too, because he will have an employee who doesn’t think like an employee but thinks like an owner. I will always look out for what is best for the business as opposed to what is best for a certain individual.”
Postscript
After Mr. Goldman made up his mind to sell Batteries Plus, he was in the middle of one of his 12-hour days when two brothers from Orange County strolled in. They were shopping for a Batteries Plus franchise for their hometown. “They asked me how much it would cost,” Mr. Goldman said, owner of the West Los Angeles franchise rights. “So I said to them, ‘How would you like to spend the same kind of money and take over a store already doing a heavy volume? Maybe this store will be available.” The Orange County brothers, Randy and Jonathon Pingol, made the deal, took charge of the store, and they are moving their homes to Culver City. The transaction, Mr. Goldman sad, “was a no-brainer. It would take them three years to get to the volume that I have now.”
In Tuesday’s installment, Mr. Goldman will critique the projected teardown and rebuild of the 100 South Sepulveda businesses. From the standpoint of a property owner, he also will speculate as to whether or when the spectacular remake will occur.
