Why Hull Still Has a Hardware Store
Most small towns lost their hardware stores twenty years ago. Hull didn't. Here's what that says about the town — and the family that kept it open.
Welcome to the first issue of The Corner Post. This newsletter covers people, land, and business at the corner of Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota. Published every Tuesday from Hull, Iowa. Free.
Walk into De Jong Hardware on Main Street in Hull on a Tuesday morning and you’ll find the same thing you’d have found in 1987: bins of bolts sorted by size, a wall of paint samples, and someone behind the counter who knows your name.
That’s not an accident. It’s a choice — made repeatedly, over decades, by a family that had plenty of reasons to close.
The Store That Shouldn’t Still Exist
By most measures of retail economics, a hardware store in a town of 2,200 people in northwest Iowa shouldn’t survive 2026. The nearest Menards is an hour away. Amazon delivers to every rural route in Sioux County. The big-box consolidation that gutted small-town retail across the Midwest hit this region the same as everywhere else.
And yet.
De Jong Hardware has been on Main Street since 1952. It’s currently in its third generation of family ownership. It employs six people. And on most weekday mornings, there’s a line at the counter.
The reason isn’t nostalgia. It’s a specific kind of value that the chains can’t replicate.
What You Can’t Get at Menards
“We get calls every week from people who drove to Sioux Falls, couldn’t find what they needed, and came back here,” says the current owner, who took over from his father in 2009. “We stock things that don’t move fast but that you absolutely need when you need them.”
He’s talking about specialty fasteners for older farm equipment. Hydraulic fittings. Specific grades of chain. The kind of inventory that a regional chain optimizes out because the turns-per-year don’t justify the shelf space.
In a farming region, that inventory is the difference between a two-hour fix and a two-day wait for a part to ship from a distribution center in Kansas City.
“When a planter’s down in May, nobody wants to wait,” he says. “That’s our business.”
The Counter as Infrastructure
There’s something else Vander Berg has that Menards doesn’t: institutional knowledge.
The man behind the counter on a Tuesday morning has been there for 22 years. He knows which farms use which equipment. He knows that the Vander Pol operation north of town switched to a different hydraulic system three years ago. He knows that a specific fitting that looks like a standard size is actually metric.
This is not something you can hire for. It accumulates over decades of showing up.
“We’ve had people come in with a piece of broken equipment, no idea what it is, and he figures it out in about 90 seconds,” the owner says, nodding toward the counter. “That’s worth something. That’s worth a lot.”
What the Next Ten Years Look Like
The third generation is honest about the pressures. Margins on commodity hardware are thin. The customer base is aging. Young families in Hull are as likely to order from Amazon as anyone else.
But there are also tailwinds. The region’s agricultural economy is strong. The farm operations that anchor Sioux County’s economy are large, complex, and dependent on local supply chains. And there’s a growing awareness — accelerated by the supply chain disruptions of the early 2020s — that local inventory has real value.
“We’re not trying to compete with Amazon on price,” he says. “We’re competing on being here, knowing what you need, and having it.”
That’s a narrower market than it used to be. But it’s a real one.
A Note on What This Newsletter Is
The Corner Post is going to cover a lot of stories like this one — businesses that have been running for decades, people who have built something in this region, operations that define the local economy but never get written about.
This is not a booster publication. It’s not a chamber of commerce newsletter. If something is broken or wrong, we’ll say so. But the starting assumption is that this region has more going on than the regional papers have time to cover, and that the people here deserve a publication that takes them seriously.
Every Tuesday. Free. Worth reading.
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The Corner Post is published from Hull, Iowa. Story tips and corrections: [email protected]
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