 How do the Mapes stores compete against the big boxes?
By being Mapes stores.
By Bill Kent / Photograph by Kevin Fleming At the very edge of Raymond Benner’s universe, looming like some impossibly huge astronomical body is Wal-Mart, the small-town Arkansas discount retailer that, in the space of 25 years, has become the biggest and highest-earning corporation in the world. At another edge of his universe is Target, a brighter, spiffier competitor hoping to beat Wal-Mart at its own game. Somewhat closer, but still big enough to cause cosmic devastation, are warehouse retailers like BJ’s and Costco and the category-killers like Home Depot, Toys-R-Us, and Bed, Bath and Beyond. Closer still are smaller, but no less pervasive, chain retailers: discount pharmacies like Rite-Aid and CVS, as well as supermarkets, hardware stores and gift shops that sell clothing, household supplies, toys, greeting cards, gifts, American flags, Elmer’s Glue, Scotch Tape, shoe laces the kind of stuff you don’t know you need until you can’t find it or you run out.
So how is it that, with so many small-town main streets across the country suffering because of competition from huge, national retail chains, Benner’s three Mapes’ five-and-dimes, two Mapes’ toy stores, one Mapes’ hardware store and one Mapes’ card-and-gift shop are so much a part of the Main Line that, without them, life just wouldn’t be the same?
Benner has several answers to that question. The one at the top of the list is, “I didn’t change the name?’
A sign right outside Benner’s office, crowning the facade of Mapes’ Five and Dime at the corner of Haverford and Forrest avenues, identifies this as the oldest store in Narberth, founded in 1897. It is the oldest surviving store in the borough, though Narberth old timers still like to call it Davis’, after Charles E. Davis, who opened the five-and-dime more than a century ago.
A historic marker in front of Mapes’ Five and Dime commemorates Davis’ as the unofficial hangout of National Football League Commissioner Bert Bell. Bell, who also owned the Eagles (and was part owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers), used to frequent Davis’ soda fountain, turning it, as well as the lending library and sports trophy room that Davis created there, into an informal social club.
All that came before Bill Mapes, a retired New York textile salesman, bought the place in 1959. Mapes was 73 when he put his name out front, using, according to legend, the same typeface and same colors for the sign because the name Mapes, like Davis, is five letters long and ends in S.
Back then Lancaster Avenue was the Main Line’s Main Street, with the most important shopping areas sprouting along the secondary streets that connected Lancaster Avenue to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Main Line train stations and on streets that led to the trolley lines that began a short walk from the station.
Narberth’s main street was, of course, a little different. A small town that was both isolated (an elevated section of track cut the town off from busier auto traffic on Lancaster Avenue) and connected to the greater Main Line by its train station, Narberth’s Haverford Avenue ran parallel to the .tracks. Davis’s Five and Dime, a stone’s throw from the ticket office, was one of those places that almost everybody passed going to and from the station.
“If you needed anything, we had it,” Barbara Duer recalls. “If you wanted to come in and say hello, Frank Hess, the manager, was always there to say hello. Every day Bill Mapes would come in with his wife to talk to the people at the fountain. Everybody loved the fountain. It was the center of the town.”
In 1973 Duer, now 71, landed her current job working the cash register at Mapes’ Five and Dime. Less than a year later, Bill Mapes, 97, died, and the store passed to Frank Hess, who, after a few months, decided to retire. He put a three-line advertisement in the Philadelphia Inquirer about a business for sale. The ad caught Benner’s eye, so he called Hess. The first thing Benner asked was where Narberth was.
Benner, born in Philadelphia’s great North East, had been living in Langhorne with his family. He had delivered eggs door to door in Levittown before he found a full-time job managing a poultry store in Philadelphia. When he grew disgusted with cutting up chicken parts, he got a job in a Woolworth’s. He loved it. “You get to talk to people,” Benner says. “The simple pleasure you get from finding whatever it is that people needed, I could never get tired of that. And at the end of the day, I didn’t have to wash chicken blood and guts off my hands.”
After Woolworth’s he managed, then owned a series of five-and-dimes, hardware stores and gift shops from Philadelphia to the tony Jersey shore town of Bayville. By 1974 he had tired of spending 12 hours a day at either his Mayfair gift shop, his Levittown hardware store or his Bristol five-and-dime. His son Russell had just come into the world, so Benner wanted to put his eggs, so to speak, in a single basket. “What I really wanted to do was get into a mall, but I couldn’t get backing,” he says. “In retail, it takes forever to establish the kind of credit that the banks like to see. I just didn’t have it then.”
Benner sold his three stores, earning about $50,000—$46,000 of which he used to buy Mapes’ Five-and-Dime from Frank Hess. “I spent the $4,000 on inventory, and that went in a week,” Benner says. “I honestly didn’t know if I’d still be in business after six months. Frank Hess gave me the best advice I ever got, and that was I could do what- ever I wanted with the inventory and the interior of the store. The one thing I could not do, if I wanted to survive in Narberth, was change the name.”
Benner’s wife Janet, whom he consults on all his business decisions, agreed. Then, as now, the names of established, dependable family businesses are land -marks in small towns. And the Main Line—as busy, diverse and commercially developed as it has become—persistently refuses to see itself as anything other than a small town on a grand scale.
But in 1974 every Main Line main street had a Woolworth’s, a Murphy’s or a McCorey’s five-and-dime. Nobody in eastern Pennsylvania had heard of Wal-Mart, sprawl was a word for what you did on a couch at the end of a hard day, and a piece of penny candy cost exactly one penny.
Now a penny buys nothing, Wal-Mart makes more money than General Motors, sprawl signifies cancerous suburban development and nearly all the traditional main street five-and-dimes are gone.
But in any of the three Mapes Five-and-Dimes, you can buy individual Swedish Fish candies for 5 cents and other candies for a dime. You can also outfit yourself from head to toe with long winter underwear or poolwear though maybe not the chichi items advertised in fashion magazines. Benner’s average customer spends less than $10 per visit, though it is possible to buy a $1,800 gas generator at the Mapes hardware store in Havertown.
Though no one named Mapes is employed in, or has anything to do with, the Mapes stores, Benner’s business is still family owned and run. First son Russell is president of Mapes Stores, a privately held corporation. Russell’s brother John is the company’s courier and delivery driver. Grandchildren Mike, Ray, Chris and Shawn work in the stores. Benner, 61, calls himself “the owner.” His wife Janet “is, and always has been, my most important advisor.”
“All the other stores grew out of this one,” Benner says. “When I bought this store, the Mapes name was respected and trustworthy, and we have done everything we can to maintain that trust. Each time we opened up a new store, we did it with the idea of taking something we were already doing well and doing exactly the same thing in a different location. And every time we opened a new store, we had times when we thought we wouldn’t make it, that we wouldn’t just lose the store but the whole business. Fortunately, we’ve managed to pull through. It hasn’t been easy. Not once has it ever been easy.”
Benner’s idea of success, “is to first be what people need, then be what people want.
“Nobody can out-Wal-Mart Wal-Mart. They’re the best at what they do. So we sell what they can’t or won’t. At Wal-Mart you can get Hallmark cards, so at our card shop we have lines by card makers that people haven’t heard of. At Bed, Bath and Beyond, you can buy a towel that you wouldn’t mind displaying in your bathroom. At Mapes, you can get a 50-cent washcloth that your kid can take along to summer camp or a towel you can lose at the Jersey Shore. Mattel makes a line of collectible Barbies that they won’t sell to the chains. We’re going for the entire line. We aim to be the capital of the world for collectible Barbies.”
Though Benner has ambitious plans for his stores, all is not well in Benner’s universe. While sales in the toy stores have been rising steadily, hardware is just holding its own, and sales in the five-and-dimes have been flat for the past four years. “Flat sales are better than decreasing sales,” Benner says, “but your costs keep going up, so you have to bring up the sales and, believe me, if I knew how to do that, I would have done it by now.”
Benner has only one “want” that he’s been unable to fill. “I want to find a way to bring back the soda fountain, or something like it, that would bring people in so that the store could become a meeting place for a neighborhood in the way that a bar or restaurant or a Starbucks isn’t. You wouldn’t rush in and rush out. You could come in with your kids and stay a while, talk, say hello, catch up on things. You expect that kind of thing in a town like Narberth, and I would love to be the guy to do it.” • |
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