“It’s an emotional time for me, I’m going to miss meeting people every day, which I love,” said Victor Edge, as the owner of Edge & Sons hardware store in Fairview has recently put the beloved corner property up for sale.
Standing proudly behind the well-worn countertop and nestled in between stocks of everything from brushes to birdseed, Victor tells The Irish Times that as he nears his 77th birthday, the time has come to take a step back from working, six decades after he started full time in the shop at the age of 16.
A much-loved fixture of Fairview for more than a century, the hardware shop was passed down to Victor through three generations of Edges. His grandfather Elias Edge first opened their doors on March 19th 1917, handing over to his son Elias, Victor’s father.
Now 106 years in business, Victor said that Edge & Sons would have been nothing without its loyal customers – including the Edges Hardware Appreciation Society, a 900-strong Facebook group of supporters.
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“There’s children coming in to me now, I know their parents, their grandparents, and in an awful lot of cases I would know their great grandparents as well. All the regulars I had all through the years, you couldn’t really call them customers any more, I call them friends,” he said.
“I would just like to say thanks for the loyalty of customers around, only for them we wouldn’t be here all this time,” he said.
He said that the Edge’s winning approach to retail has always been about “being understanding and being fair, and not overcharging and ripping people off”.
Looking back over the history of the shop that is older than the Irish State, Victor said the one memory he will never forget is when the nearby river Tolka burst its banks in 1954, leaving much of Fairview and the surrounding area under six feet of water.
“Water rose to counter level height in the shop, people went past in boats, you could see everything floating around from saucepans, cases, buckets everything. It took right over the weekend to disperse, and when it did there was a shocking amount of dirt and muck to be cleaning up ... I was eight or nine, and it was the most exciting time for me in fairness,” he said.
With the shop building up for sale and unlikely to continue as a hardware store, Victor admits Edge & Sons is one of many small family businesses that are slowly disappearing.
While neither of his two daughters were interested in taking over, he said they are following their own paths in careers as a teacher and as a medical scientist.
“I’m very happy with that, and it makes things a little bit easier,” he said.
Victor has said that Edge & Sons will stay in operation until a sale of the property is finalised.
What are his retirement plans after that?
“None yet. Well, my wife has quite a large list for me at home for gardening and things like that,” he said.
