I was just a few years out of college when I applied for a job at one of The Cool Hardware Company’s stores in Washington, D.C. It was an hourly role helping customers find the right products on the floor. It was meant to be temporary while I was pursuing other things.
Then, in my first phone interview, the manager said, “I noticed you have a degree in mathematics. One of our locations, near Logan Circle, actually needs an inventory coordinator. Are you interested in that role?” I said yes, though I still imagined this would be short-term.
At the time, I had no idea The Cool Hardware Company was employee owned. But when I started, I saw a culture completely different from what I’d experienced before.
There are tons of studies about young people entering the workforce right now. We want to be engaged and challenged by our jobs, and that’s not happening for most people. We want to make a positive difference, while managers are struggling to carve out the time to train us. And, we have little confidence that retirement is in our cards.
As a relatively recent graduate, I understand the cynicism. I think one of the reasons it persists is because a proven antidote, employee ownership, remains vastly underused.
Since 2021, The Cool Hardware Company has been employee owned through a retirement plan that lets companies share ownership with workers. It’s called an employee stock ownership plan, or ESOP.
Quickly, I saw how an ownership mindset changes the way everyone works. Whether we’re on the registers or stocking supplies or in the back office, everyone’s voice matters. From the start, if I had an idea on how we could improve something, my proposal was taken seriously. As I grew into the job, I learned more about how the ESOP impacts our personal finances. It’s a retirement plan that doesn’t require you to pay anything. In the simplest terms, the better work you do, the better the company does, the better financially you and everybody around you become.
In those early days, I was probably asking our former inventory manager a new question every five minutes. Like other co-owners, he thought about how day-to-day decisions will impact us years from now, and so he was incredibly patient. Over time, that approach paid off. Over four and a half years, I grew to be an assistant store manager and am now inventory manager, stepping into my former boss’s role when he moved on. I’m always working to make things better, and so our inventory record is more fine-tuned every year, a critical need as more and more people purchase their hardware supplies online.
Our customers see the difference too. Our store staff are super knowledgeable about our inventory, can recommend how to solve both common and obscure problems, and keep up to date on our regulars’ ongoing projects. We know that if you have a bad experience with us, you’re probably going to turn to Amazon for your next purchase, which in turn will take money out of all of our pockets. People keep coming to us because we make sure our customers have an awesome experience every time, and that the products in each store are tailored to their neighborhoods. If you go to the Logan store, you’ll see queer-themed novelty socks, while the Takoma Park store carries local neighborhood t-shirts. The same is true whether it’s the Petworth or Union Market store.
Among my peers, I imagine few people are thinking about retirement, but I already feel well set up. Between my traditional 401(k) and my ESOP account, I’m building something that can transform my life decades from now. And most importantly, this same opportunity is available to everyone in our company--cashiers and managers alike.
With Labor Day upon us, I imagine we’ll start to see more dire headlines and politicians wringing their hands about my generation’s uncertain future. There are only 18 ESOPs in DC, just 110 in Maryland and fewer than 6,500 across the country. But we can change that. Expanding ESOPs, a coalition of more than 100 organizations, is building a movement to grow employee ownership in the DMV region and beyond.
Turning things around in this economy will take more than hoping the status quo delivers different results. This Labor Day, let’s try something new and commit to making more workers employee owners. You can trust my experience. After all, my job is all about delivering tools that fix things.
Ashley Bell is the inventory manager at The Cool Hardware Company, a group of fifteen employee-owned hardware stores in the DC, Northern Virginia, and Baltimore metro areas.
For more stories from employee-owners, check out Voices of Ownership from Expanding ESOPs, a promotional partner in our ongoing subscriber campaign.
I love the idea of this, but I have a quarrel with the word "give" in the headline. And I suppose with the "we" in help build. What would a rephrasing look like that acknowledges a worker's earned opportunity or pathway to ownership? What are the obstacles to expansive employee ownership? What would that system look like? What would happen if every company took a pledge to create a pathway to employee ownership? What would have to happen to make that a reality?