Business dating back to 1923 changes hands
New owner worked at Ocean Grove hardware since he was 14
Bob Easin, 38, started working at Ocean Grove Hardware when he was 14. Now he and his wife own the place.
“I came with the store,” joked Easin, who was already working there when Dave and Carol Gilliland bought the Main Avenue business 20 years ago.
“I started working here when I was 14 in 1988,” he said. “[Former owners] Dick Gennnone and Joyce Flood hired me. All through high school, through college and after college I worked here.”
“I’ve never not gotten a w-2 from Occean Grove Hardware,” Easin said.
In February, the Gilliands sold the business to Easin and his wife Lisa Easin, 35.
“Dave and I got to talking and I told him that when he was thinking it was time I wanted to have the first rights to it,” said Easin, a Neptune native who still lives in the township.
Easin went off to Rutgers and studied psychology with a minor in labor science, but the lure of the store was always too strong.
“I eventually ran the inside, then the handyman service and then started doing the outside part of the business,” he said.
The 89-year-old hardware store is a link to a simpler time before the big box national chains. “It opened in 1923, and the verbal lore is that it was first called Angles and Smith,” Eastin said.
And Easin plans no changes to the basic formula of the business.
“People don’t like change. When a business like this has new owners, everyone gets really nervous that you’ll change it to something else,” he said.
“We don’t plan on doing that. We’ll improve some things and we want to put our fingerprints on it, but we want to stay as a local hardware store,” he said.
Eastin also said he and his wife plan to increase the store’s community involvement through various activities open to the public.
For example, once a month his wife will set up a table outside the store for kids to come work with pre-cut wood. The first project will have them build a little birdhouse.
“We want to get kids interested in stuff around the house,” Eastin said. “It doesn’t happen as much these days. With my father, I’d be constantly asking him, ‘what’s this?” or, ‘how does that work?’ when he was working around the house.”
Asked how a local hardware store like his can compete against the Home Depots, Eastin immediately said “customer service”.
“When you call here you’ll always get the same person,” he said. “With the big box places, it’s whomever.”
