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Photo courtesy John Winters Thanks to The Boren Foundation, and Jack and Karen Kay Leonard for making this website possible. |
Can You Trust Your Paint and Hardware Store?
A Toolkit to Check Your Local Stores for
Advice and Supplies on Health Hazards
Strategies
I. Define the Project
You need to make some basic decisions in order to manage the project. Your choices will generally depend on your interests and your volunteer’s interests. The survey can be a great learning experience for your volunteers. A minimal check of pesticides and paint takes about 20 minutes per store assuming the store clerks are available to help. A more thorough check may take 45 minutes. It is important that you visit at least 90% of the stores that fit your profile. Picking and choosing which stores to visit will undermine your impact so try to reach them all.
You should make the following decisions:
o Who should do the store visits? One person can conduct the visits and develop the report. But you may have more success getting volunteers groups to take on the project. Scout groups, church clubs, community groups, and local environmental organizations may be willing to handle to serve as volunteers. You not only learn about the stores performance but your volunteers can learn about the issues. The interaction is an excellent learning opportunity. Some helpful guidelines are:
i. Keep the number of volunteers below fifteen to keep it manageable. If you use more, consider visiting stores several times to get a better measure.
ii. It takes between 15 and 45 minutes to visit a stop based on the items to be checked and the availability of store clerks to provide advice.
iii. Limit the number of visits to less than six a day. More than that gets too confusing.
iv. Use the buddy system to make it more fun and easier for the volunteers to remember.
o What hazards do you want to check? You need to check the paint department. The paint department’s advice is a core part of the program since lead poisoning is the most significant hazard a child is likely to face. Pesticides in the home or garden are a nice complement. You can also check out the treated lumber, safety equipment and thermostats but it takes more time and is often not as fruitful. Work with your volunteers and see what they are interested in doing.
o Should you aim low or high? As of early in 2004, the performance of most stores is so poor that you may want to start with the basics and see how they do. Few retail stores provide good advice or sell the best supplies so you are likely to be frustrating your volunteers with so many “no” answers. However, our goal is to improve this performance for children to be protected. We will be raising our goals during the coming years.
o Pick your area? You need to define the area that you want to check. Usually, you want to get all of the competing stores in an area. To visit the stores serving a medium-sized city like Indianapolis with 750,000 residents, you will need to visit about 60 stores.
o What type of stores? You need to be consistent in your selection of stores to visit. The basic options include:
i. “Big Box” retail hardware chains such as Menards, Lowes and Home Depot should always be checked. They are in direct competition. Our hope is that one of the chains will begin to take the health of their customers seriously and provide quality advice and products. Most of a chain’s stores in an area will have similar products and policies.
ii. The national franchise hardware store chains are Ace, Do-It-Best, and True Value. These stores usually have a limited coverage area. They often have loyal customers that are being drawn to the prices at the “Big Box” chains. Each store operates independently from the others with shared marketing, products, and training.
iii. Department stores with paint and pesticide departments such as Sears, Target and WalMart. There are also many regional chains. Paint and pesticides are generally a small part of their business but it is still an important part. They also do not give out much advice regarding paint or pesticides. They offer the products for sale and mix paint to match your color. Visiting them is helpful but not essential.
iv. Retail paint stores. These stores specialize in paint and should provide the best advice. As a result, they are the trusted advisors to many contractors and do-it-yourselfers. Unfortunately, IKE’s experience has not been good with paint stores. They perform about the same as the big box hardware stores. You need to visit them to have an impact.
o Training: IKE has developed a 90-minute training program for volunteers on the basics of paint and pesticide visits. It relies on a PowerPoint presentation. In Indiana, IKE can provide the training in person at no cost. Outside of Indiana, IKE can work with your trainer and tailor the PowerPoint presentation to your needs.
o Information Management: To bring about significant improvement in the industry, IKE needs both anecdotes and statistics of you visits. You can gather this information in three different ways.
i. On-Line: IKE has developed an on-line form to enter your store visits. Go to www.ikecoalition.org/stores and click on “Share Your Experiences.” You will need to submit all of the information for a store at once.
ii. Spreadsheet: IKE can provide you with a spreadsheet to serve as a template for entering the information. This is the easiest and most effective approach.
iii. Email and Word: You can provide the information as you get it in email notes or in a Word document. This approach can be difficult but can work.
o Funding: If someone is willing to coordinate the training and the information, IKE is willing to donate $10 per store to a charitable 501(c)(3) organization that uses this toolkit and at least reports the results for paint stores and paint departments. IKE can provide $20 per store for a more thorough review of the stores. You will need to coordinate with IKE’s Tom Neltner before beginning the work.
In small stores, your volunteers may need to buy some of the recommended supplies in order to avoid raising concerns with the clerks. IKE does not provide funding for these supplies.