You won’t find bread, fresh produce or meat at this supermarket.
What you will find is lots of steel and aluminum, plus metals such as copper, brass and bronze available either at the store or through quick order.
Metal Supermarkets, touted as “the convenience stores for metal,” just opened a location in Colorado Springs. The Canadian-based company has more than 125 stores across the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom. The Springs location is the fourth in Colorado — and the second to be opened by franchise owners Jason and Deirdre Frank.
The Centennial couple opened their first store a year ago in Englewood, but Jason Frank said they’ve had their eyes on Colorado Springs from the start.
He sees the Springs as a hot market. “It’s really been growing fast, so there’s a lot of construction. …. We were getting a lot of calls in Englewood from Colorado Springs.”
The business, which specializes in “small-quantity metals,” attracts three groups of customers, Frank said. The first is “the professional crowd,” such as welders and landscapers — “folks that are going out there and doing work on site and need things that day cut to size.” The second is businesses with some form of manufacturing or their own maintenance department that are in need of metal. And the last is do-it-yourselfers and hobbyists. The hobbyists are “all over the map,” Frank said, from artists who use metal in their work to people making knives or tools.
He sees Metal Supermarkets as more complementary than competitive with another metal business in town, Metal Mart. “We actually send a lot of people to Metal Mart. When I think of Metal Mart, I think more like siding, flashing. We are much more raw metals.”
The leased location at 1615 N. Academy Blvd. was desirable because it is “pretty accessible to all quadrants of the city,” Frank said. The size, at about 5,400 square feet, is smaller than the roughly 8,300-square-foot Englewood location and thus “pretty lean,” but he said he’s excited about the lot space, which makes it easy for customers to get in and out quickly; he’s also happy to be an early tenant of an industrial redevelopment taking place in the area.
Many people who become franchise owners decide first to go into franchising, then pick what franchise might excite them. In his case, Frank was interested in getting into the metal business and saw Metal Supermarkets as his path to get there.
A former Marine, he first got plugged into the metals world when working at DeWys Manufacturing, a family-owned sheet metal fabricator in Michigan. “I got to see them solving a wide range of problems from a lot of different angles,” he said. “You are just always learning and get to feel like you were a small part of the solution. It’s something that always stuck with me and I finally found a way back to it when I opened a Metal Supermarkets.”
