Your Ace Is Set to Change Owners Nov. 10. The Sign Stays.

EAST HARWICH · CHATHAM

Paul and Lynn Fox plan to retire. Their East Harwich and Chatham stores are set to go to a 14-store owner and stay Ace.

4 min read · A Celebrate Lower Cape spotlight

On Tuesday, Nov. 10, a sale is scheduled that you may not be able to spot from either parking lot. Paul and Lynn Fox of Harwich are set to sell Harwich Paint and Decorating, at 181 Route 137 in East Harwich, and Chatham Paint and Hardware, at 624 Main St., to GE Supplies LLC. The deal covers the businesses and the buildings, and the Foxes didn't give the Chronicle a price.

They started with a paint and wallpaper store in Orleans in 1998, Cape Cod Life reported in 2022, and the Chronicle dates the East Harwich store to 2007. They're retiring to spend more time with their five grandchildren. Twenty-eight years of the couple's business is set to end, and that's a real loss for two towns, but this is a change of hands, not a closing: both stores are expected to carry on as Ace Hardware stores, with the staff expected to stay.

How can the owners leave and the sign stay? Because Ace never owned the store.

Ace stores "are not franchises"

Cape Cod Life made the point in its 2022 profile of the Foxes: Ace stores "are not franchises, but independently-owned businesses." The Chronicle calls Ace a cooperative purchase group, which lets independent owners band together to buy goods at lower prices. Ace's own careers site goes a step further and says the corporation is owned by its retailers.

So the sign works more like a membership than a chain's logo. The store's owner is the employer, Ace's careers site says, not the corporation. Harwich shows how that looks: Baskin's in Harwich Port flies an Ace sign under different owners, and it was a True Value until 2018.

The buyer heard through the Ace grapevine

The buyer found its way here through the trade. Paul Fox told the Chronicle that GE Supplies heard the stores were going on the market by word of mouth through Ace connections.

GE Supplies owns 14 hardware stores in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, including one in Mashpee, with principal offices in Westport, the Chronicle reported. It named Glenn Finkelstein and Edward Siegal as the investors in this purchase. A 2013 Patch report had a Glenn Finkelstein adding a seventh Ace store in Westborough, and the name and the trade match, though that story doesn't name the company.

If the sale goes through Tuesday, the count reaches 16. The stores would still be independent in Ace's sense, meaning owned by a member and not by the corporation. They just wouldn't belong to a Harwich couple anymore.

The space nobody has rented

Here the Foxes' own account gets more interesting. "Their intent is nothing will be changing, the personnel has been rehired," Lynn Fox told the Chronicle. Paul Fox said the new owners will run the stores in much the same way, and called the staff "our best asset." Until Tuesday, take that as a stated plan: the employees are expected to stay.

The same article also says a little remodeling is coming to the Harwich store, and that the incoming owners plan to build on what's there. Then there's the plaza. The Terry's TV and Appliances shop in the East Harwich complex closed about five months before the Chronicle's report and its space remains empty, and Lynn Fox said that although people have asked about leasing it, GE Supplies asked the Foxes not to rent it, because it wants to figure out whether it will need the room.

None of that contradicts "nothing will be changing," exactly. It does suggest the plan runs past keeping the lights on, so we won't promise you the store a year from now looks the way it does this week.

Lynn Fox stays a while

The two exits won't happen on the same day. Paul Fox goes straight into retirement. Lynn Fox, whose side of the business centers on Hunter Douglas window treatments and draperies, says she'll stay on to finish several ongoing projects.

Chatham's store is the younger of the two. The Foxes took ownership of the former Chatham Hardware building in 2021, opened in July 2022, and held a grand opening that September with food, music, and doughnuts. Four years later it's set to change owners, and it isn't the only Lower Cape name this fall where the fine print matters. At Cobie's, the listing kept the name out of the sale.

Everything we know about the buyer's plans comes through the Foxes. We haven't found a statement from GE Supplies, and the Chronicle's account doesn't say whether the store names, the hours or any house accounts carry over. If you have an open order, ask at the counter before Tuesday.

The staff weighed on the Foxes when they went looking for a buyer, and Lynn Fox said why. "They are family to us and that was a concern," she told the Chronicle. "We wanted to find a buyer that treats the staff well."

KEEP READING

Other signs that told only part of it

Three more Lower and Mid Cape names where the sale, or the sign, tells only part of it.