Part Eight of a Series

This series of informational blog posts come from a document Mike,Caesandra and Kevin created to help orient new Buffalo ReUse board members to our mission,vision,values and the actual history of our organization. Earlier parts: One Two Three Four Five Six Seven

The ReSource is Access. It is an open door to affordable, high quality building materials and a support system for home owners. Buffalo ReUse’s ReSource is our retail destination for high quality building materials, environmental education and community activism. The store is located in Buffalo’s midtown, at 298 Northampton Street. It is nestled right on the border of the Masten Park & Cold Spring neighborhoods. It is just around the corner from Canisius College, Art Space, the Merriweather Library and the newly restored Packard Building Apartments.

As part of our mission aimed at regenerating neighborhoods and empowering communities, the ReSource functions as our largest point of contact with the public. We serve predominantly an East Side customer base, but attract people from all over WNY and nearby Ontario.

All day long, we sell high-quality building materials at very low prices–including many items which are rare or one-of-a-kind. Our prices and materials help people at all income levels stabilize and improve their homes. We also spend a great deal of time engaging in lively conversations with everyone who calls on the phone or comes into the store. We’re constantly connecting customers and local residents with Buffalo ReUse community programs, with each other, and with other resources they need and with government services.

The ReSource is now fully staffed and open 56 hours every week, closing only on Mondays. Since November 2008, we’ve been using a computerized Point of Sale system, can take credit cards and can track sales in a far more sophisticated way than with our previous manual system. Pricing, always a challenging task, is stable, methodical and appropriate to our customer base.

Sales have been steady – in fact, our biggest challenge is to keep up the volume of material coming in the back door to match the material going out the front. Word of mouth continues to be an amazing source of materials and of new and repeat customers, though we’ve also been quite successful in gaining varied media attention to the store and our other community programs.

To increase the flow of material and find new sources, we’re reaching out to contractors, suburban homeowners and anyone else who may have excess materials. We do pickup runs based on calls in to the store four or five days each week. This brings us some of our most desirable materials. Our demolitions continue to provide a much-needed source of low cost lumber, brick and stone which sells in impressively large quantities. We’re also salvaging materials, mostly the older stuff, from houses being demolished in Buffalo by other contractors.

Current priorities include staff training and procedural documentation. We’re also constantly working on store procedures, store design and merchandising, signage and computer systems to improve safety, sales and the customer experience. Every member of our sales team, including some stalwart volunteers, contributes in their own creative way to these efforts.

A current challenge is meshing our systems with the accounting systems being set up by our newly hired financial manager. The auditability of our sales activities is improving as a result of this effort.

I encourage everyone who hasn’t been to the ReSource, either ever in life or for a while, to come on down and talk with us. We’d be happy to discuss what we’re doing every day to help Buffalo ReUse achieve financial stability and to make the ReSource a true destination for not only shoppers but the numerous people interested in sustainability and those who are concerned about the perilous state of our city and its most vulnerable citizens.