Westlake Ace Hardware
The Firm
The trap in this trade is the cooperative. Ace, True Value and Do it Best are member-owned co-ops, and a store JOINING one is not a store being bought. Westlake is a retail chain and a subsidiary of Ace Retail Holdings, and it buys stores.
The shape of two recent purchases is worth knowing before a first call. Each target was already a co-op member, so the co-op is how a buyer finds a seller rather than being the buyer. Each release names the selling family, states the completion date months ahead of it, and quotes the sellers on why: one pair said the buyer would take care of their employees and the stores would continue to prosper.
What happens to the sign varies. One store keeps its own branding and the other is rebranded, and both releases say which, which is the detail a seller who built the name will ask about first.
Read again in September 2026: the Westlake banner has announced only openings since Olson's, four of them in one spring, and the parent, now styled Ace Retail Group, counts more than 260 stores across eighteen states. The one purchase on the site since is by the sister banner in Michigan, which is the door a Detroit-area owner would knock on. The whole newsroom opened that evening added five agreements from 2022 to 2025, each release naming its completion day and none followed by a closing release.
What It Buys
Overland Park, Kansas. A hardware retail chain that buys family-owned stores and keeps the staff, which is a different thing entirely from the member-owned cooperative whose name it shares.
Selling to them one day, or watching them as the other bidder? Track them in the Contact Book so the relationship has a next-touch date.
Confirmed Deals
8 deals traced to announcements by Westlake Ace Hardware, 2022 to 2025, newest first. Firms that announce every deal show a fuller run here than firms that report acquisitions as quarterly counts, so read this as the evidence that clears the bar rather than as the firm's whole record.
- Macomb Ace Hardware · October 27, 2025
A Macomb Township, Michigan store bought by Great Lakes Ace, the sister banner under the same parent; closing January 2026.
- Olson's Ace Hardware · August 20, 2025
A family-owned hardware retailer with two Kansas stores, whose sellers said publicly their staff would be looked after.
- Dale Hardware, Inc. · May 7, 2025
A seventy-year family Ace store in Fremont, California, agreed in May with completion set for July 28, 2025.
- Edgebrook Ace Hardware · March 11, 2025
An 8,700 square foot family-owned hardware store on Chicago's northwest side, bought from owners who had run it since 2005.
- Augusta Ace Home Center · January 13, 2025
A family store in Augusta, Kansas, agreed in January with completion set for March 17, 2025.
- Breed & Co. Ace Hardware (four stores) · July 29, 2024
Three Austin stores and Spicewood Ace Hardware from a fifty-year family retailer, completion set for September 30, 2024.
- Clarks Ace Hardware (two stores) · April 17, 2024
A 179-year-old retailer's two Maryland stores in Ellicott City and Columbia, completion set for June 23, 2024.
- Trails West Ace Hardware · November 8, 2022
A Gardner, Kansas store, agreed in November 2022 with the sale set to finalize on January 15, 2023.