One Home Hardware Dealer Ditched a Year-Long Wait and Drove Home a Yellow F-150 the Same Day

About ten years ago, during the Home Hardware summer dealer show in St. Jacobs, something unforgettable happened. We were still building awareness for the Home Hardware Truck Program, so we brought a yellow F-150 to park in front of our booth. It was bright, eye-catching, and a perfect example of what the program could deliver.

Partway through the show, a dealer from Northern British Columbia approached me — and he was clearly upset. I didn’t understand why at first, but then he explained: he had been waiting almost a full year for his own yellow F-150, ordered through his local Ford dealer, and still had no build date. No updates. No timeline. Meanwhile, we had one sitting right there in front of him. His frustration made sense.

What most people don’t realize is that specialty colours like Home Hardware yellow are only produced when the manufacturer has enough orders to justify running a paint batch. One individual dealer in BC doesn’t have enough volume to influence that schedule. So they wait… and wait… and keep waiting.

But the Home Hardware Truck Program changes that equation. Because we place large national orders and operate as a single, unified fleet, Ford prioritizes our builds. Instead of hundreds of small dealers competing for production, we buy in bulk — and bulk gets moved to the front of the line. That’s how we had a yellow F-150 ready to showcase while he was still stuck in queue.

The dealer walked away from our booth that first day irritated and disappointed. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see him again. But the next morning, he showed up with a completely different tone. He told me he had called his local Ford dealer, cancelled his year-long order, got his refund, and wanted to buy the truck we had brought to the show. We signed the paperwork right there, and he drove that yellow F-150 all the way from St. Jacobs, Ontario back home to Northern British Columbia.

That moment perfectly captured the value of the Home Hardware Truck Program. When dealers act individually, they’re forced to wait until the manufacturer has enough orders to justify a production run. But when every Home Hardware dealer is treated as part of one massive fleet, they gain buying power, speed, and reliability that a single store could never access on its own. The program exists to give dealers exactly that advantage — faster trucks, fewer delays, and far less frustration.