Frentz
Hardware still has wood floors with a little bounce to them, and a wall of
windows facing Main Street. The aisles are stuffed with tools and parts
that are often difficult to find, and once found, you still might not know
exactly what to do with them.
At
Frentz, they’ll walk you through the project you’re working on.
They’ll tell you what you do and don’t need and spell out the right
way to do it. If one of the Frentz brothers can’t help you because they
don’t have what you’re looking for, or honestly don’t know how to
tackle the job, they’ll steer you to someplace that does. “We have an
extensive list of stores with maps to give to customers when they
need to find something we don’t have,” Mike says. “We’ll even
explain what to ask for when they go to another store for something we
don’t have.”
That
doesn’t happen too often, though. One member of the trio usually nails
it. For example, Chip remembers a woman who came in one day saying she had
been to several stores looking for an odd-sized screw needed to hold up
her under-the-cabinet radio. “I said sorry, we don’t have it either.
But I did rethread the radio to a more common size, and made her day.”
They’re proud of
their other specialties – lock re-keying (“We haven’t had a key
returned once,” Mike says), cutting and threading pipe, window and
screen repair, extensive lines of hard to find items such as switch plates
… but most of all, their service-oriented approach to the people who
frequent their store.
