True Value: John Cotter 70 years of hardware

The hardware store inspires nostalgia. Redolent with odors of paint and oil, it calls up reminiscences of a real or imagined past on Main Street. Yet most of today's hardware stores are thoroughly modern places. Hardware stores today face stiff competition from home centers.

The independent hardware stores might have been turned into museums or gone out of existence altogether, except for the efforts of one man, John M. Cotter. Few outside the hardware trade know his name or can identify Cotter & Company, the business he founded in 1948. Unlike some others, Cotter doesn't star in the company's commercials. Most Americans, however, instantly recognize Cotter's brand name, True Value Hardware. Two hundred million True Value direct-mail promotions reach consumers' homes every year; and dozens of times each day, Pat Summerall, Paul Harvey and hundreds of local announcers proclaim over the airwaves, "We've got what it takes", or "'True Value', it's our way of doing business."

The average consumer probably considers his neighborhood True Value a chain store; but, in reality, an independent businessman owns each store, and these hardware dealers together own Cotter & Company, a mutual or cooperative corporation. Profits earned at the middleman's sale level are rebated back to the store owners at year's end. Though the middleman's functions are not eliminated, for they are essential, dealer-ownership eliminates the middle-man's profit, allowing independent retailers to compete with nationwide corporate chains.

John Cotter did not think up the idea of dealer-ownership, nor was he the first to apply it to the hardware trade; but he developed the idea more thoroughly and efficiently than anyone else, kept it on a firm financial basis, and spread it nationwide. In the process, he helped save the independent hardware store from extinction and transformed an industry. This is the story of John Cotter, a bold entrepreneur, and the company he founded.