On Monday, August 24, residents gathered with Jan and Dean Turner to bid goodbye to the Tumbler Ridge Hardware Store that they’ve owned and operated for the last 22—nearly 23 years.
They opened in November of 2003, which means that they are getting out of the business two months shy of 23 years. (They officially handed the keys over on September 1.) But why get out of the hardware business now?
“Mostly, we just needed to take a breather,” says Jan. “And the timing just kind of worked out. We’ve had the store listed for a while, because you don’t sell these things overnight. It is maybe a little early for us, but honestly the timing is right.”
Dean says they’re not planning on making and rash decisions. “We have no plans to leave. We’re still going to be here.”
He says this year has been a hard one on the family with health issues and whatnot, so having a little bit of time to “get a little bit of life out of life,” is needed now. “It would be nice to maybe not work for 24/7. I’ve got twenty-two years’ worth of projects to do with the house that I just haven’t got to. And it would be nice to spend some time with family, walk around. The boys are in town, so no, we’re not we’re not going anywhere.”
He says there’s a lot of great memories of raising the two boys in the store. He remembers a time early on, when Brady was three. “He was just forming sentences nicely,” says Dean. “A guy comes in and he’s looking for I think it was an O-ring or something in the plumbing department. Brady walks up and goes, ‘can I help you find something?’, and he goes ‘I’m looking for one of these.’
“Brady grabs it. He looks at it, he looks over at the shelf, where it’s right at eye level. He picks it off the shelf and says, ‘I think this will work for you,’ and hands it to the guy. I was just around the corner and the look on this guy’s face was amazing, like, he just got schooled by a three-year-old. He was just dumbfounded. It was so funny.”
Jan says for her, it’s the people she’s miss. “The customers that are genuine have become friends and family to us.”
While the store is now a Home Hardware, it started out as Jade True Value, and the couple misses those early days. “True value was a much smaller network. If you had a question, you knew exactly who to call and who to talk to. And the boys have couple of best friends in Ontario that they met through buying shows and things like that. They’ll have those friends for life.”
And, while they’re no longer at the hardware store, they will be around town. “Lots of people have said we won’t see you a around and I’m like, you know what? You’ll probably just see us in a different place now,” laughs Jan. “Instead of always seeing us here, we’ll be out and about now, we’ll have time to do other things.”
Is this the last act for the couple? Probably not. “It’s a break,” says Dean. “We have no idea what the future’s going to bring for us. So we’ll take some time decide what we want to do.
Jan says they’ve seen lots of ups and downs in their time here. When they opened in 2003, there was no operational mine and a lot of empty houses, and we just thank the community for welcoming us.
Speaking of welcoming to the community, the new owners are Mark McTavish and Amanda Yacyshen. They recently moved to Tumbler Ridge from Canora, Saskatchewan, after working in the concrete industry, Yacyshen as an equipment operator and McTavish as co-owner of McTavish Concrete with his brother.
“We just decided we were going to change it up and come see what Tumbler Ridge was all about,” says Yacyshen. “It’s a very magical place and we love it here so far. Everyone’s super nice.”
McTavish says he was looking at things and decided that he couldn’t do another 15 years in the concrete industry. “So, one day I started looking for Home Hardware Stores for sale, and this one popped up. I asked Amanda if she’d be interested and she said yes, so she got ahold of Jan and Dean and we came to check it out last September long weekend.”
It was love at first sight, not just with the town and the area, but with Jan and Dean themselves. “We’ve been working on trying to figure out a way to buy the business ever since,” says Yacyshen. “ We both used the word magical several times. We went back and mulled things over and got the process going. We came back and looked for a house and met some more people earlier this summer.”
He says he was looking at Home Hardware as a possible option because of the brand recognition and because of the way a lot of the business is already set up for you. “You don’t have to look for a bunch of independent suppliers. We weren’t looking to reinvent the wheel, we were trying to find something stable, something that people would need everyday.”
Yacyshen says making the leap from concrete to a hardware store wasn’t that far. “We know the products and we’re good with people, so we thought we’d come on down.”
For now, the plan is to keep the store running as is, though the hope is to put their own unique touch on things as time goes by. McTavish laughs. “I’m brainstorming new ideas all the time and Dean’s killed ninety percent of them already just by saying ‘well, we tried that ten years ago and that didn’t work.’ We’ll probably sneak in a few pet projects over time there.”
They’re hoping to find a way to strike a work/life balance. “There’s amazing hiking and everything to do around here,” says McTavish. “I used to go canoeing and kayaking, but once we started the concrete business I haven’t been in a canoe in fifteen years. So we’ll try and get a good amount of staff so we can extend the hours and all that sort of thing, but we don’t want to be here seven days a week either. We want to explore and be out in the community a little bit as well.”
Yacyshen says she’s looking forward to meeting new people at the store. “We’re very friendly people, easy to get along with and we look forward to meeting lots of new people.”
McTavish says they’re always open to new ideas, too. “If there’s something that you wish that the store had, but has never been there and would really like to see it, we’re definitely open to hearing about it and seeing if we could bring in products that people need in their daily lives. So don’t be afraid to voice your suggestions.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
