The Home Builders Store

"It was during,my early years in the retail lumber game in Montana that I began to read A. L. Porter's stuff in the old Western Retail Lumbermen's magazine urging lumbermen to improve their methods and join the ranks of real merchants, and his stuff was good, too. Later I ran into your stuff in "The Gulf Coast Lumberman," which I read for several years, and now I read it in "The California Lumber Merchant." It has been this reading that has had much to do with the way I have tried to develop my business, and I do not hesitate to say so." So wrote Robt. W. Baird, manager of The Home Builders Store, in sending in a photograph of his plant at Carlsbad, California.

The Home Builders Store is located withina hundred feet of the main corners of Carlsbad, and is 42 feet by 6O feet, containing the store proper and service rooms, and a well ordered ware-room for mill work, paper, etc. The yard extends 30O feet back and joins the right-of-way of the Santa Fe railroad. They own their own property.

The store and service roorns were designed for two purposes; to properly display their merchandise, which is everything in the building line; and to assist the home builder to see what it wanted, rvhat it looks like, and further yet, to give the home builder an opportunity to make an intelligent selection. AsMr. Baird writes, "there are hundreds of building helps, some large, and many of them small, in our store and service rooms to show our customers exactly what they want, or should want, or are interested in." Roofing and stucco samples are on a small structure on the outside of the building where they are subject to actual weather conditions. fn answer to our question, how he runs his business, Mr. Baird states: "Well, it is run, not as a lumber yard, but as the name implies, as a building store. We never lose sight of this. Our business is to sell materials, but there is a heap sight more fun in the game when one develops the business from the first desire, and sees it through to a happy and satisfied home owner. Of course, the materials go along with them. We do not enter the building field, and our relations with our contractors and carpenter friends is a very friendly one."

Mr. Baird has always been interested in modern lumber merchandising methods. It started over twenty years ago when he took up architectural drawing in high school in Chicago. Later, after graduating from the University of Chicago in 1912, he spent two years at a sawmill in western Montana. Then followed his retail experience, all of which was spent in Montana except the last two years. He sold out in Montana in the spring of. L926 and started his present operations at Carlsbad. At Carlsbad, he is assisted bv his associate. C. M. Davv.