Where have all the old fashioned Five-and-Dime gone?

The United Woman’s Club of Concord (UWCC) will feature Maynard Forbes, owner of the West Concord five-and-dime as the speaker at their Thursday, January 17th meeting at noon at the West Concord Union Church, 1317 Main St, Concord. Guests and new members are welcome to join the meeting.

Maynard Forbes is a unique individual who is part of a handful of business men to run an old fashioned five-and-dime stores. There are barely any of these stores still in business across the USA. An article in the House Beautiful Magazine in December 2016 issue identified 9 Old-Fashioned Five-and-Dimes You Could Still Shop At. That article neglected to include one very special store, the West Concord five-and-dime. As luck would have it, the VisitingNewEngland.com website published an article about this very special store, entitled “West Concord five-and-dime Brings Shoppers Back to a Simpler Time”

Concord Chamber of Commerce named Maynard Forbes in 2015 as Concord’s Business Person of the Year. West Concord Five and Dime, dates back to 1935 and was bought by his father in 1951 and has been owned by the same family since 1951. People who shop there are accustomed to the idea that you can walk in and find anything, from bobby pins to stationery, from electrical cords to blenders, from penny candy to, well, fishing bait.

Forbes started running the business in 1982 after spending 24 years in the Army, retiring with the rank of colonel. However, he wasn’t sure about returning to Concord. “I wasn’t certain that I would come back,” he said. “However, if the business was going to continue, I had to be involved, because my father was older and my sister was not interested.”

He ran the business for the next 23 years before moving to Maine, where he built a house. He said it was where he could finally put to use what he had studied in college - he earned a degree in agriculture in 1958 from UMass Amherst.

Forbes didn’t spend as many hours in the store as he used to in the ’80s and ’90s, because he was caring for his wife Jean, who suffered a stroke. “I’m a caregiver and retailer,” Forbes said, adding that returning to run West Concord 5 & 10 hasn’t come without setbacks.

Maynard and Jean left Chris Curtis, to run the business for his parents for more than two decades. In 2013 Chris was heard explaining to customers that the it has hard to keep the shelves stocked because his main supplier, Arrow Wholesale Inc. in Worcester, which had provided quirky inventory to small, dime-store-type businesses all over the country for generations, went out of business. That loss, coupled with the decrease in business facing small neighborhood shops everywhere, as more consumers flock to malls, superstores or online, was draining the lifeblood out of the West Concord 5 & 10.

However, tragedy brought the pair back to Concord in 2013. Forbes’ stepson, Chris Curtis died in his sleep in May 2013 in Texas, while traveling with a group from Cloud 9 Tours, a company that provides trips for those interested in chasing storms.

Someone had to run the store, and Forbes knew what he had to do. “The military prepared me for a lot,” Forbes said last week, during an interview in his office at the West Concord 5 & 10. “It taught me not to break up when circumstances are beyond your control. So Maynard and Jean moved back to Concord after eight years in Maine – “I never used the word ‘retired,’” he said of his time in Maine – and since his return, he has made sure the shelves at West Concord 5 & 10 are stocked – 43,280 items - and the customers are happy.

He has 11 employees and when asked about the future and how long Forbes plans to run West Concord Five and Ten, he says “I do not have firm plans.” However, he said he will adhere to his father’s business motto of “having the right product, at the right time for the customer.”

One of UWCC Club Members wrote a wonderful heart filled description about Maynard Forbes. After reading this article, we hope you will want to join us for this meeting.

“WC 5&10, as we familiarly write it in our shopping list, is a very convenient place – within walking distance! -- to fill a wide range of household needs. Its old-fashioned physical presence is a picturesque trip down memory lane. But more than that, WC5&10 also provides a social experience that we value very much.

The character of that experience comes from the character of Maynard Forbes. Honest, direct, quick-witted, ingenious, helpful, thoughtful, humorous. My earliest memory of him is of hearing a deep-voiced man in the next aisle, with patience and insight, helping a customer determine which product would best meet their needs. I thought I had strayed into a James Stewart movie. Everyone who patronizes the store knows Maynard in the store context, and will have a favorite anecdote about dealing with Maynard or about his son Chris or even his father John.

My oldest anecdote about interacting with Maynard myself is of one day back in the 1980s when I was purchasing a paper cutter for use by the local chapter of Amnesty International. Maynard discounted the price when I hadn’t even dreamed of asking for that. Everyone knew that local stores were being hard pressed by the proliferation of big box and discount stores. But he did it in his low-key manner as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

The store building has a character too. It is a wonderful mystery. The floor has two levels, the layout is like a maze, the shelves and wall space are packed with stuff, the windows update for every season and holiday, you keep running across things that you thought had stopped being sold thirty years ago, and you get the feeling that the back room might have 2 or 3 underground stories or simply a door into hyperspace to hold extra inventory and out-of-season items. I call it a wonderful mystery from the viewpoint of a customer. I am sure that to Maynard and the staff it is a tightly and demandingly run ship with no mystery about it!

For additional information, please contact Lisa Fay at 617-448-2506.