Popular chains and brands have nevertheless disappeared, leaving behind priceless memories. Throughout the week, five of these stores are mentioned by our readers – more than 700 answered our call to all.
Today: Pascal
Just one screw. Tiny in addition.
But in Camile Roberge’s memories, she gives the full measure of the devoted attention that the clerks of the large Pascal hardware stores paid to customers.
PHOTO JEAN-YVES LÉTOURNEAU, PRESS ARCHIVES
For Camille Roberge, the Pascal hardware store was the equivalent of “a big RONA” with impeccable customer service.
We are talking about a distant time, of course.
The Pascal store was a hybrid of Canadian Tire and Réno-Dépôt before the letter.
It was a big RONA. I don’t think there is a Quebecer from the Montreal region who has not bought at least once from Pascal.
Camile Roberge
His favorite store was located at Le Boulevard shopping center in Saint-Léonard.
“It was a place where the service was warm,” he recalls. They were men who sometimes seemed taciturn, but when you spoke to them, it flowed well. They were very helpful. ”
In his memory, they were all between 50 and 60 years old. “Glasses, graying hair. It was pretty much all the same model, ”he describes, laughing softly.
They had invented customer service before their time.
Camile Roberge
Our man speaks knowingly.
“I was vice-president of a chain of stores, a name that we no longer see today: United Cigar Stores. I was a sales manager at Laura Secord and made my living for 30 years training in retail: customer service, merchandising, inventory management. “
In short, he has his “credentials in retail,” he says with a frank laugh.
In retrospect, and with the perspective of his long experience, he remembers a somewhat messy store, which sold a bit of everything for the home, with a predominance in bulk.
They weren’t fashionable stores like today. But still, there was an atmosphere that made you feel comfortable going shopping there, digging around and touching everything. We felt at home.
Camile Roberge
He went there for fuses, light bulbs, a thousand little household things. “Whenever I needed screws, nails, a little tool, this is where I went. No big tools, however. He was not a great handyman at the time. He had perhaps obtained “a plane there because[il s’était] made a library, or a hand, but it is limited to that ”.
A handyman, children, is a long cordless saw, but without electricity either, which is mainly used today as a musical instrument.
Alphabetical disorder
Camile Roberge says that during a conference given in Quebec, an American specialist had shown a photo of a display where toilet seats were next to toolboxes. Their proximity was justified by alphabetical order: Toilet Seat and Tool box. “It was a bit like what we found in Pascal too,” he says.
But these breaches of best practices in merchandising are redeemed by an anecdote that has remained stuck in his memory.
The event happened in the mid-1960s, the 76-year-old estimated.
“At the time, the top of the stove was rocking,” he says. You could lift the top. And there was a little screw, in front, that we could tighten so that it wouldn’t move. And I remember that on my mother’s stove the screw was cropped. We couldn’t screw it any more. “
Drama.
Equipped with the offending object, he went to the neighboring Pascal and walked towards the radius of the nails, screws and bolts.
The endearing clerk was waiting behind his counter.
Camile Roberge then produced the body of the offense.
“I said to him, ‘I apologize for bothering you for not much. Do you have a little screw that looks like this? ” “
“The clerk replied: ‘We have all the vices at Pascal’s, sir.’ ”
The clerk was deadpan – a hardware expression.
Equipped with the incriminated screw, the clerk went to his back room with the assurance of a judge of the Supreme Court.
“It came back after 10 minutes with a small screw, exactly the model I was looking for. I couldn’t believe it! “
– How much ?
– Oh a big six cents. ”
“Six cents! ”
About half a penny for every minute he spent on it. Or 30 cents an hour.
“And all this with absolute good nature!” Not reluctantly because I was taking his time! ”
For twenty years, Camile Roberge has given training on customer service in retail businesses.
“If these stores had all done like Pascal, I would have starved! This is the image that remains for me from Pascal. “
I have this knife. It was bought by my father-in-law from Pascal in the 1960s. It is still widely used, and when I have it sharpened, I am told that it is a very good quality.
C. Morier
Monsters and dragons, too
We didn’t just find tiny screws at Pascal’s.
Some also bought there fire-breathing dragon species, or noisy monsters whose sharp teeth carved furrows in metal – in the eyes of a young boy, at least.
At the turn of the 1960s, Jean Latrémouille’s father owned a few apartment buildings in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, which he maintained himself.
When he needed a special tool, he went to Pascal on Bleury and Saint-Antoine. It was the Craig store, as it used to be called.
Jean Latrémouille
Unlike the other stores, this one had a semi-industrial section.
“My father knew the managers of the place, we were welcome. I’m talking about the 1950s and 1960s. ”
A time that those under 60 cannot know …
To fix antediluvian plumbing – and to prevent downpours – his father had to thread the ends of iron pipes to screw them to elbows and fittings.
“We bought a threading machine with four legs. We went to the store on Craig. My father had been there two or three times to check if it was the right device. It was still quite expensive. ”
The motorized object was impressive, even with the retrospective gaze of an adult.
“It looked like a horse, that business. There were talons and arms two or three feet long. ”
With the same concern for efficiency, his father had acquired in the same place an industrial torch to strip paint from woodwork or railings.
“It was a torch,” he describes. There was a small pump to build up pressure, and a small valve at the top. We opened it and it flowed into a small tank on top, which had to be heated. ”
“When the upper part was hot, it created a flame like a flamethrower. ”
With its side handle, the cool device was about the size and look of an old percolating coffee maker.
Jean and his brother were unable to use it “because it was too heavy”.
Having become a vigorous teenager, Jean learned to use it to strip the stairs and ceilings of his father’s buildings.
He paints a colorful picture: “It was long and it was hot! The hot paint was falling on our heads! And it smelled like the devil! ”
Imperishable memories …
The other side of the mirror
Chance – or nostalgia – later wanted Jean Latrémouille to see the other side of the scene.
Having become an industrial engineer, he was working at Bell Canada when, in 1981, he saw in the newspaper Press a job offer for a distribution manager at Pascal.
“I knew Pascal stores by heart, but I didn’t know anything about distribution,” he says. But my specialty at Bell was cost-benefit studies. “
Pascal’s warehouse had indeed a great need for order and method. It had some 200 employees and about fifty drivers for the trucks for which Jean Latrémouille was also responsible.
“There was no maintenance plan for the trucks. They repaired as it broke, ”he is still surprised.
Paperwork reigned supreme. Purchase orders were completed by hand.
“We modernized a lot of things, it was at the very beginning of computers. ”
Having become a member of the Quebec Handling Society, he visited many warehouses to draw inspiration from best practices.
In the United States, the first warehouse hardware stores were beginning to appear, with their shelves reaching up to the distant ceiling.
Pascal had a short-sighted perspective in this regard.
“In all stores, the policy was that shelves never exceed five feet. The manager had to be able to see the store from across to avoid shoplifting. “
When the timid possibility of raising the shelves to six feet was mentioned, “Pascal said: we’re never going to do that. Imagine the flight! “.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the hardware store died out in 1991. Despite its name, the Pascal store did not experience a resurrection.
When I was little, I learned the name “Pascal” long before the word “hardware”!
S. Barker
When my father moved into an RPA two years ago, he got rid of his small tools. Some in their original box and label from Pascal hardware. It brought back forgotten memories of my childhood, when he took me shopping with him for renovations he was finishing part-time to make ends meet!
D. Rhéault
The competitors of nostalgia
Handy Andy
Handy Andy! Back home, in Beauce, it was the store for our “big firsts”. First real hockey stick. First bike. First baseball glove. First drill. First pint of oil for your first bazou. First GI Joe. A kind of Canadian Tire, but on a human scale. In Saint-Georges, when you wanted to touch a piece of paradise, you had to go down the grand staircase to the toys and sporting goods.
L.-M. Because we
Direct Film
Go have a film developed at Direct Film after taking pictures with my Kodak!
N. Corriveau
Pascal’s little story
A Jewish immigrant of Romanian origin, Jacob Pascal opened in 1903 a first – and modest – hardware store on Boulevard Saint-Laurent, opposite the Monument-National.
His sons Maxwell, Hyman, Cecil and Arthur will soon join him.
In the 1930s, father and son opened branches in various neighborhoods of Montreal.
In 1950, when it was enlarged, the flagship store located at the intersection of De Bleury and Craig streets (now Saint-Antoine) announced itself as “the largest hardware store in the world”.
The founder’s descendants will create an equipment division for hotels and restaurants, another for industrial supplies, as well as a chain of furniture stores which will also display the red P of the well-known logo.
At its peak, the company operated 26 stores in Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick.
The company was still owned by the third generation of the Pascal family when the hardware chain went bankrupt in 1991.
The closure of the 21 stores that were still open resulted in the loss of 1,600 jobs. Under the protection of the Bankruptcy law since the previous January. Pascal owed around $ 42 million to 1,400 creditors.