Kay Craven knows she can answer the questions of any customer who walks through the doors of Kellogg Hardware and Appliance in West Point, but she doesn’t insist on it.
“New customers usually want to talk to a man first, and I let them,” longtime store manager Craven said. “But they always come back to me.”
Bucky Kellogg, the owner of the store, agreed.
“They let me answer the phone, but everyone says, ‘Let me speak to Kay.’ They may only want to know the time, but they only want to get it from her,” he said.
It’s a strategy that has helped the store keep customers for a lifetime, but soon Craven will be looking for a new job. The Kellogg family began a liquidation sale May 13 to prepare for Bucky Kellogg’s retirement and the store’s final closing.
Kellogg has been working full-time in the store since he graduated from college and completed his military service in September 1971. By that time, his father, Buck Kellogg, had owned it for more than two decades — since he returned from World War II in 1946.
In the early days, when Bucky began working in the store, he sold wringer washing machines and galvanized pipes. Today, those have been replaced by automatic washing machines and PVC.
Also during that time, Craven joined the staff. She has managed the store since about 1988.
The times may have changed, but Kellogg’s dedication to customers has remained the same, Craven said.
“In Kellogg’s, nothing has really changed,” she said. “Our customers have been handed down for generations. We served grandma and then her children and now her children’s children.”
Craven has learned how to handle nearly every type of problem, from plumbing to appliances.
“People come in with almost anything … they might come in with a question about a refrigerator or bring in a lamp, and I can fix it,” she said.
She once fixed a lamp made from a vase that had cost several thousand dollars.
“I told the customer I wouldn’t do it because I might break it,” Craven recalled. “She said, ‘Well, if you break it, you break it.’ So I fixed it.”
And it’s not just electronic devices.
“People have asked me what I’d do for a cold … just everything,” she said.
More than a hardware store
It’s both that level of care and the variety of goods that makes Kellogg’s feel so special to the community.
The vintage sign out front promising “Speed Queen” and “Hot Point” brands and the heavy wood-and-glass front door make walking into the store feel a bit like walking into the past.
The wooden floor is worn soft by generations of feet, and the counter in the middle of the store has the patina of thousands of hands.
Rows of shelving offer a little bit of everything. There are, of course, nails and hammers, a variety of radial sanders and grits of sandpaper to go with them. But they also offer something for nearly everyone, from three types of coffee percolator to fishing lures, child-sized bicycles and long-handled dusters.
Like the floor and the counter, the staff offers its customers the kind of service that is a throwback to bygone days. An ordinary afternoon will find customers clutching cash and asking to pay on their tabs.
Bucky is quick to warmly welcome customers who walk through the door and thank them just as warmly when they depart. Despite his coming retirement, he is still extending credit to his regular customers.
When a customer this week bought an air conditioner, he asked, “Are you taking it with you today?” The customer was, so with scarcely another word, he and one of his workers loaded it on a dolly and wheeled it out front to the customer’s car.
That’s the sort of customer service that is typical at Kellogg’s.
“It is more than just a hardware store — on many levels,” said Lisa Klutts, director for the West Point-Clay County Growth Alliance, who has fond memories of the place. “The store is in the middle of Prairie Arts Festival, and I could just walk in there and get an extension cord or bungee cord or whatever I needed for the festival … or I could just hide for a minute!”
Klutts has come to rely on Kellogg’s for her personal needs as well. She said she rides her bike to work when the weather grows warm.
“Sure enough, the first day I ride my bike every summer, I get a flat tire,” Klutts said. “My office is just a few doors down from Kellogg’s, so I walk it down to the store. They air it up for me.”
Klutts doesn’t know who will take care of those everyday needs now that the store is closing. It will leave an empty building on West Point’s Commerce Street, where the business has been a fixture since it moved there in 1952.
But for Klutts, it’s about more than the empty storefront.
“Yes, it will leave a hole in downtown,” she said. “But it will also leave a hole in my heart.”
‘Call Bucky’
Klutts isn’t the only one who feels that way. Kellogg’s feels like part of the family for longtime West Point resident Felecia Finley.
“My grandfather used to take me to Kellogg’s every Saturday, whether he bought anything or not,” she remembered.
Finley visited the store weekly with her grandfather, E.W. Moore, for years, until he could no longer drive. But Moore didn’t stop shopping there.
“When we helped him on his farm and needed supplies, he would always say, ‘Call Bucky … he’s got it,’” Finley said.
“Calling Bucky” is a tradition Finley has kept alive.
“My grandfather always bought his pocket knives from Kellogg’s, and he always bought Old Timers. So I went to Kellogg’s and bought an Old Timer for my son, Elliott, and one for myself,” Finley said. “I tell Elliott stories about Kellogg’s all the time.
“When that store closes, there will be a part of me going away as well,” she added.
Customers like Klutts and Finley are what has kept Kellogg’s and its employees going all these years, but Bucky has decided it’s time for him to retire.
“I’ve been there long enough,” he said.
Yet Kellogg seems in no particular rush to leave. When customers call, worried their favorite hardware store will close before they can drop in one last time, he is quick to reassure them. “Oh, we’ll be open for a while yet,” he tells them. “We still have to sell all this stuff! Don’t you worry about it. We’ll be here.”
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