Aubuchon Hardware

Bernard W. Aubuchon Jr.

• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781439620021
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

William E. Aubuchon Sr. immigrated to the United States from Canada in 1900 at the age of 15, speaking no English and armed with only a fifth-grade education. Through hard work and perseverance, he established a hardware store in 1908 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. One hundred years later, there are over 130 Aubuchon Hardware stores located throughout Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont, employing about 1, 100 people. This remarkable growth by Aubuchon Hardware can be attributed to the company treating its customers as friends and always making them number one. As William E. Aubuchon Sr. once said, The business was founded on the principle of buying economically. We give our customers what they wanthigh-grade hardware at a price everyone can afford. Aubuchon Hardware never lost track of where it started, and today it still remains all in the family with over 20 family members currently employed, including the fourth generation. In Aubuchon Hardware, family members were an invaluable resource for photographs and historical information.

Three

MOVING AHEAD

William E. Aubuchon Jr., eldest son of the founder, is shown here at the 1973 fall regional sales meeting in Grafton, Massachusetts. One of his favorite sayings to the employees was “thank you for what you’re doing for the company.” To nonemployees working with the company, he would say, “Thank you for being in the building.” He was the company president from 1950 to 1993.

As the company grew in the late 1960s, it became evident that there was no more room to expand at the Fitchburg headquarters. Therefore, 52.8 acres of land were purchased in Westminster, Massachusetts, along the eastbound lane of Route 2. The first building was built by Seppala and Aho Construction in 1970.

The office area, shown here under construction in April 1973, is located on a mezzanine in the northeast corner of Phase II. The truck garage and fixture shop are in the lower level of Phase II.

The distribution center is a steel-framed structure with masonry block walls and six-inch poured-concrete floors. The building was constructed in three phases: Phase I in 1970, Phase II in 1974, and Phase III in 1988. Each phase contains a mezzanine, which is important to the material handling systems.

The majority of products sold at Aubuchon Hardware stores are purchased directly from the factories and delivered to the Aubuchon Distribution Center pictured here. In this building, truckloads of merchandise are unloaded and put away by workers called receivers. Other employees, called pickers, gather together a store’s order. The order is loaded into a truck and is delivered to a store by an Aubuchon truck driver.

When the warehouse was moved from Fitchburg to Westminster, the name of the building was changed to Aubuchon Distribution Center. A change was also made from the straight trucks pictured here to tractor trailer trucks. In 1974, 21 International and Mack 22-foot-long straight trucks were replaced by 8 International Transtar tractor trailers.

Tractor trailer trucks could haul more merchandise over longer distances than straight trucks. This is a picture of the new trailers that were purchased in 1974. Another advantage gained by switching to tractor trailer trucks is that a trailer could be loaded or unloaded while the tractor is free to make a delivery with another trailer. By 1991, the Aubuchon truck fleet consisted of 12 Mack tractors and 25 Fruehauf 48-foot trailers.

In 1974, there was a grand opening of the new office and distribution center. The principals of the company are shown on the stairway of the office lobby. From left to right are William E. Aubuchon Jr., M. Marcus Moran Sr., Peter J. Aubuchon Sr., Andre R. Aubuchon, Bernard W. Aubuchon Sr., M. Marcus Moran Jr., and William E. Aubuchon III.

The Aubuchon purchasing department is pictured here at the 1974 distribution center open house. From left to right are Raymond Bedard, Roger Ouellette, Janice St. Cyr, Raymond Sontag, Donald Marks, and Robert Lavoie. At this time, all the telephones in the office were orange.

The new distribution center was so large that a battery-powered buggy was used to get around the warehouse. Here Andre R. Aubuchon and his wife, Beverly, take a test drive. Andre was the corporate attorney and a member of the board of directors for many years. He was the son of John B. Aubuchon.

John B. Aubuchon, at the age of 84, uses a tricycle to quickly travel from one end of the di...