Greenlands Outdoor Power Equipment, which has been in Concord under the same name since 1937, is closing at the end of the month for reasons that will sound familiar to many small-business owners.
“My wife and I want to go in a different direction,” said owner Joshua Stern, who bought Greenlands in 2005 and eventually moved it to its current home in the former Cityside Grill building. The job, he noted, is “all-encompassing.”
Greenlands sells and services big items like snow-blowers and riding mowers, smaller items like chainsaws and string trimmers, and all the ancillary equipment to professionals and home-owners throughout the Concord area. It has done so for generations.
“A lot of customers have the grandfather-father-son type of history,” Stern said.
One of those long-time customers is John Tardif, who dropped by on Wednesday because he had heard that Greenlands is closing as of March 31.
“I’ve been a customer for many, many years. I did almost all my business here,” said Tardif, who owned Tardif Landscaping for many years.
Stern, 53, isn’t sure where Greenlands got its original name. It was located in the Page Belting Co. building for decades. Stern bought the business as it moved, first to a different location on Manchester Street and then to the current home, which was originally an A&W restaurant and then Skuffy’s before becoming Cityside.
Business has done well, he said. He has had an average of 10 employees serving customers within a roughly 50-mile radius.
The industry is changing, Stern said, partly because a throw-away society makes people less interested in repairs, partly because it’s getting harder to hire trained technicians, and partly because increasing electronics in equipment makes it harder for independent service providers to fix anything.
“Even chainsaws, you plug them into the laptop and figure out what’s going on,” he said.
Stern would have been happy to sell the business and keep the name going, but couldn’t find the right buyer. Some prospects balked when they learned what was required to keep things running.
“People wanted to buy the store and have someone else run it. That doesn’t work,” he said. “You can’t be a part-time boss.”
Stern said the property has been sold already, but he’s not sure what the new owner plans to do with it.