True Value: John Cotter 70 years of hardware

About this book

The hardware store inspires nostalgia. Redolent with odors of paint and oil it calls up reminiscences of a real or imagined past on Main Street. Yet most of todays hardware stores are thoroughly modern places. Hardware stores today face stiff competition from home centers. The independent hardware stores might have been turned into museums or gone out of existence altogether except for the efforts of one man John M. Cotter. Few outside the hardware trade know his name or can identify Cotter & Company the business he founded in 1948. Unlike some others Cotter doesnt star in the companys commercials. Most Americans however instantly recognize Cotters brand name True Value Hardware. Two hundred million True Value direct-mail promotions reach consumers homes every year; and dozens of times each day Pat Summerall Paul Harvey and hundreds of local announcers proclaim over the airwaves "Weve got what it takes" or "True Value its our way of doing business." The average consumer probably considers his neighborhood True Value a chain store; but in reality an independent businessman owns each store and these hardware dealers together own Cotter & Company a mutual or cooperative corporation. Profits earned at the middlemans sale level are rebated back to the store owners at years end. Though the middlemans functions are not eliminated for they are essential dealer-ownership eliminates the middle-mans profit allowing independent retailers to compete with nationwide corporate chains. John Cotter did not think up the idea of dealer-ownership nor was he the first to apply it to the hardware trade; but he developed the idea more thoroughly and efficiently than anyone else kept it on a firm financial basis and spread it nationwide. In the process he helped save the independent hardware store from extinction and transformed an industry. This is the story of John Cotter a bold entrepreneur and the company he founded.