Bill Hart III took over as general manager of Strosniders when his father retired eight years ago.
instructed, so customers will assume that the item has been selling. In 1968, Strosniders moved to its current location in Bethesda, a spot vacated by an Acme supermarket at the northern end of the shopping center. The bigger space allowed for a larger inventory and the opportunity to display seasonal goods outside. In 1984, Stan Smith, who owned Bradley Care Drugs, and his business partner Bob Koenig, approached the ailing Strosnider about buying the store. Strosnider agreed to sell the business if Hart could stay on as day-to-day manager and become an equal partner in the ownership of the store. The sale caused some strain within the Strosnider family. “My sister and I approached my dad and said we wanted to keep it in the family,” Robin says. “He
told us that he wanted to make sure our mother was taken care of, and the partners who bought the store had to put up their homes as loan collateral. If it came to it, he said, your mother would never take your homes from you!” Sister stores opened in Potomac Village in 1993 and Silver Spring in 2000. The three owners share 90 percent of each store, with the remaining 10 percent controlled by the general managers of the three respective stores. When Hart was still managing the Bethesda store—he retired eight years ago—Smith and Koenig left him alone to run the business. However, he does remember one instance when Smith was examining the inventory and sales records and raised a question. “Bill,” Smith said, “you haven’t sold any of these cast-iron
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shutter hinges, let’s get rid of them.” Hart replied that there were a lot of older homes in the area. “Someone will want them, and where else are they going to get them?” About a decade ago, when compact fluorescent lightbulbs started replacing incandescents on the shelves, a woman pulled up in a Range Rover and bought $15,000 worth of the old-school bulbs, making several trips to haul them away. The store still stocks incandescents because, well, you never know. Such was Hart’s philosophy: Stock it and they will come—eventually. He spent a lot of time on the sales floor, tinkering with product displays. He made sure his staff wore name tags. If he found a screw on the floor, he’d tell an employee to pick it up and put it away. “That’s not a screw,” he’d say, “that’s 10 cents.”