Store to open next week at former Andersonville hardware site
Raj Patel, co-owner of the new Andersonville convenience store, stands with his son, Deep, in front of the coolers he had installed in the former site of Sharp Sentry Hardware. (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
Raj Patel, who also is part-owner of the Liquor Depot in Norris, said that vendors would be installing new gas pumps outside the store and setting up merchandise displays inside this week, and that he and his business partner, Ankit Patel, hope to open the as-yet unnamed store as early as Monday.
“We plan to be open from 6 a.m. until 9 p.m. seven days a week,” he said. “We will offer convenience-store items, along with fresh coffee and breakfast foods in the mornings, and we’re looking at having other deli-type foods during the day.”
The Patels have leased the former hardware store property, at 4011 Andersonville Highway, from the Sharp family, said Sandra Sharp. The family still owns the property, even though the store closed in 2016.
“We have leased it to an entity that has the Liquor Depot, and they are putting a convenience store in,” she said late last year.
Floor-to-ceiling coolers have been installed along the interior west wall, but the store has yet to be stocked with merchandise, and the floors were still bare Sunday except for the checkout desk inside the front entrance to the left.
“We plan to have everything convenience stores usually have, including gas, groceries and some prepared foods,” Patel said.
Descendants of C.L. Sharp, the store’s former operator, announced in July 2022 that they were planning to reopen the hardware store that September, but those plans never materialized.
Kate Bennett, whose grandfather Conley Sharp Sr. started the business three-quarters of a century ago, had said she would be the owner and manager of the reopened hardware store – just as she was when the store closed in 2016.
But she said in December that her plans were interrupted by the birth of a second child.
Since 2016, the store – near the northwest corner of Andersonville Highway (Tennessee 61) and Park Lane – had remained closed, with some of its old merchandise still on the shelves.
Patel said Sunday that among his first chores was removing the old shelving and any remaining merchandise.
The hardware store began in another location across the highway and a couple of blocks west of the current location, and moved to where it is now in 1998, said Sandra Sharp, who is the daughter-in-law of Conley Sharp Sr. and mother of Kate Bennett. She married Conley Sharp Jr., who went by the name Lewis, she said.
In the right rear of the store, a deli with dine-in and takeout service operated for about 12 years, and closed about 10 years ago when the operator, Winton Landrinou, died, Sandra Sharp said.
Patel has not yet identified the brand of gasoline that will be sold at the new store.
