“We wanted to do this as a family in a way that could ensure we sleep well at night the rest of our lives,” AAA Hobbies and Crafts owner Alan Bass said.
“We wanted to do this as a family in a way that could ensure we sleep well at night the rest of our lives,” AAA Hobbies and Crafts owner Alan Bass said.
left in the world on White Horse Pike in Magnolia is a place that also sells happiness in boxes — AAA Hobbies and Crafts, a family-owned business for three generations. On the store’s exterior are large, colorful murals of puzzles, trains, and planes that have turned heads for years and beckoned kids young and old inside, where entire worlds just waiting to be created sit packaged on the shelves.
In the real world though, life doesn’t always fit together neatly like a model kit and there’s no instruction book to tell you when you’ve reached the end of something you’ve spent years building. Sometimes you just have to call it, which is what AAA Hobbies president Alan Bass and his family have decided to do., the store is closing in the coming weeks. Bass hasn’t set an exact date yet, but he’s been steadily increasing discounts to move merchandise since March. “Whenever we’re out of or just about out of inventory is when it’s going to be,” he said of the closing.
In addition to shuttering the store, Bass is also closing the family’s online business, MegaHobby.com, and its wholesale distribution company, Stevens International, which is housed in a 55,000-square-foot warehouse behind AAA Hobbies. Remaining merchandise from all three businesses is being stocked in the brick-and-mortar store and the family put the property — which fills an entire city block — up for sale. Bass’ grandparents, Felix and Inge Bass, started their wholesale hobby distribution company out of their basement in the 1950s and established their warehouse on White Horse Pike in 1981. They opened the retail store in front of it a few years later and chose the name AAA Hobbies to get top billing in the phone book. The Basses’ son, Michael Steven, eventually took over the business before passing the reins on to his son, Alan, who became president in 2021.
The family always held regular discussions about what they needed to do to evolve and remain successful in the industry, particularly when it came to the wholesale side, which makes up 85% of the business. Alan Bass said adjustments were happening in the wholesale supply chain and distribution network that were making things muddy. “We could either evolve this way, which would involve us running in a way that just didn’t make us feel too good, or just kind of agree that it’s time to tap out while we’re in a strong position,” he said. “This isn’t a collapse or bankruptcy, this is just us deciding it’s time … It had supported three generations of our family and we were ready to call it.”
“Prices increased, it made supply chains get squeezed, and it made a lot of the supply chains even worse,” Bass said. “It didn’t affect us as much as it would have otherwise, mostly because we had started to cut down most of our buying, but it did absolutely have an enormous effect on our industry prices, which have gone up significantly in the last year.”
The family announced in November that they planned to close all of their businesses this year to give their employees time to find other jobs, though some are staying until the end. “We wanted to do this as a family in a way that could ensure we sleep well at night the rest of our lives,” Bass said.
The most difficult part of the impending closure has been the brick-and-mortar store, he said, even though it only accounted for a small percent of revenue. “The retail side is the part of the community, that’s the hardest part of all of this because those are customers we’ve known for decades,” Bass said. “People are telling me stories about meeting my grandfather or father back in the day … I think that speaks to how well my grandparents treated people, how well my parents treated people, and hopefully, how well my wife and I treated people.”
Bass’ grandfather passed years ago, but his 94-year-old grandmother is accepting of the impending closure, he said. “The advice she gave me was, ‘At the end of the day it’s just a business,’ and that was very sweet of her because she’s the one that founded it with her husband,” Bass said.
AAA Hobbies is located at 706 N. White Horse Pike, Magnolia, N.J., 08049. For updated information on sales and closing dates, visit the company’sI'm a Features columnist who writes about what makes Philly weird, wild, and wonderfully unique. I also fight for Philly's honor against all of its haters.
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