Hames Corp.: (Port West Inc.) hometown commitment.

• Author: Swagel, Will

A constant innovator in customer service, this big-time retailer thrives by keeping true to its small-town roots.

Doing business in isolated Sitka brings local retailers special challenges in shipping and stocking, but Hames Corp., the area's largest grocer, is committed to doing business here and has made Sitka the base from which it hopes to grow.

Hames Corp. operates Sitka's Sea Mart (36,000 square feet) and Market Center (12,000 square feet), two of the three grocery stores, as well as Port West Plaza, a 129,000-square-foot shopping mall in Ketchikan.

Until last year, it also operated two of Ketchikan's main grocery stores, but these were sold to Carr-Gottstein Foods Co. last year. Meanwhile, the four company-owned retail outlets in the mall were split off into a separate company, Clearwater Bay Corp. Port West Inc., the name formerly used for many of the operations, has been merged into the parent company, Hames Corp.

Centering the family business in Sitka, despite the town's smaller size and last year's closure of the Alaska Pulp Corp. mill, is a happy and solid decision, insists Roger Hames, 38, the corporation's president and CEO.

"When we were negotiating (with Carr's), they wanted to buy the Sitka stores, too," he says. "But we had to look at our base and our history. Whether there's a mill here or whether the town shrinks or grows, this is where we want to go."

He ponders a moment. "I don't think I could live here with someone else running the store."

ALASKA ROOTS

Though from different generations, and with distinct philosophies, both Roger Hames and his father Lloyd, the company's semiretired founder, share a belief in service. "You are isolated in Sitka and Ketchikan," Lloyd says, explaining the tenet that has guided his decisions for more than 40 years. "So if you are going to spend your money, then do it first class."

The elder Hames says bankers and other planners for each of his developments urged him to reduce -- both in size and quality -- the vision of the shopping places he wanted to create. He had to fight to prove that customers would respond better to plusher digs.

"We were not supposed to have a dropped ceiling, not supposed to have tile on the floor," says Lloyd of the "warehouse style" originally envisioned for Sitka's Sea Mart by financiers. "But I believe 100 percent that if people are spending their money, they deserve the best they can get."

Son Roger says that because of the closed economy that is Sitka --...