Anyone who has driven Highway 59 through Loxley, Robertsdale, and Foley on the way to the beach knows the landmark: a giant, brightly colored rooster standing guard over building supplies, hardscape, and yard swings. The bird looks like chaos. It is, in fact, a business strategy — and behind it sits a ninth-generation-deep family enterprise that started as a St. Louis junkyard and became one of the Gulf Coast’s most distinctive home-improvement destinations.
From an Iowa Junkyard to St. Louis
The story starts, as Mike Hood tells it, with his grandfather coming home from World War II. An Army buddy from Texas invited him down to meet his sister; the grandfather said “why not,” drove from Iowa to Texas, and ended up marrying a different sister. The couple set out for New York to start a junkyard — the family trade, with several junkyards already back in Iowa — but got as far as St. Louis when his new wife declared that was as far north as she was going.
They stayed. The junkyard they opened was named Ruins of America, and to pull in customers they mounted an old junk car high on top of the pile — an advertising gambit that worked, and set the family pattern: put something improbable on the roof and people will stop. Mike’s father, who had been shot in the Korean War, worked there and began buying Army surplus goods, which led to selling automotive tools.
The pivot to building supplies came from a salesman with masonite paneling. “Everybody paneled everything back then,” Mike says. The store began carrying surplus building materials at deep discounts, and operated for years as Hood’s Discount Home Center until custom-ordered cabinets and kitchen design work changed its character — and its name.
Coming South
Mike discovered the Gulf Coast on his honeymoon, driving down to New Orleans and then along the coast. “I didn’t even know Alabama had a coast,” he says. The trip took them across the mouth of the Bay on the Dauphin Island ferry to Fort Morgan, down to Perdido Key — and the family eventually bought property on the water in Josephine, near Pirate’s Cove.
In 1990, Mike’s brother-in-law Chris came south first, ready for a change from corporate life, and opened in the old Foley Tractor building on Highway 59 — today the store sits at 1918 North McKenzie Street — selling salvage building materials: ceramic tile, paneling, Formica countertops. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure it was a good business decision,” Mike admits. Nine Hood’s Home Centers now operate as family-owned stores: six in the St. Louis area, two in Alabama — Foley and Tillman’s Corner in Mobile — and one in Gulfport, Mississippi.
From Discount Salvage to Design Showroom
What changed the business was the upgrade. When Hood’s began carrying quality kitchen cabinetry, the focus shifted from discounted salvage to upscale building products — finished countertops, flooring, home decor — and the word “Discount” came out of the name. In-house designers now work on CAD systems with customers on cabinets, countertops, doors, and floors, and the company maintains relationships with area contractors for installations.
“We changed the look of the store and dropped ‘Discount’ from our name,” says Mike’s daughter Meredith, who runs the Gulf Coast operations with her sister Anna and her father and Chris. “We always have some close-out things that sell well, but you have to find what the customer wants.” Mike’s rule of retail: “If you wait long enough, people will buy it.”
The biggest sellers these days are flooring, doors, cabinets, countertops, and landscaping hardscape. The customer base has shifted, too — more women shop at Hood’s now than men, a reversal the family has accommodated in everything from the showroom layout to, as Meredith notes with a laugh, swapping which restroom is which.
The Curiosity Factor
And then there are the statues. The yard art — fiberglass giraffes and elephants, the famous rooster, vintage 1940s-era Kitty Cars shelved above the showroom — is merchandising as billboard. “It definitely gets people in the door,” Mike says. The giraffes and elephants arrived years ago in a stranger’s pickup truck; Mike said “I don’t know about that,” got talked into it, and sold them for years. The gray concrete elephants in crimson sweaters, at $120 apiece, famously put all three Hood children through college — two of them at Auburn, so the Alabama fans bought plenty.
The pandemic doubled the business. Hood’s qualified as an essential retailer and stayed open while homebound customers — binge-watching home decorating shows — arrived with projects. “People stayed home and watched home decorating shows, and would come buy things to fix up their homes,” Mike says. The beach-condo rental boom fed the home decor department in the same years.
Investing in People
The growth formula, Mike insists, is not the merchandise. “The way we grew was by investing in our employees. Ninety percent of our employees started here when they were in high school, and a few are running stores now in our other locations.” Meredith studied marketing at Auburn; Anna earned a graphic arts degree at Colorado State. The family lives in Fairhope, and the kids attended McGill-Toolen in Mobile.
The changes since 1990 still astonish the owners. When they arrived, the Tanger Outlets were just opening; a drive to a Gulf Shores restaurant and back fit inside a lunch hour, and the only place to eat nearby, Mike recalls, was the bowling alley. “The growth has been crazy.”
Mike is quick to credit the personal turn behind the business success: “None of this would have happened if I hadn’t gotten sober a long time ago.” The family still keeps its place on the water at Josephine, and Mike still boats — though he doesn’t chase the fish as hard as he used to.
Stop by Hood’s Home Center the next time a project is on the list. Let curiosity get the best of you — that’s what the rooster is for.
A Baldwin County Original, in a Region Full of Them
Hood’s belongs to a particular Baldwin County species: the family business that grew up alongside the boom. The county’s population has more than doubled since the store arrived in 1990, and the corridor from Loxley to Gulf Shores has been transformed from two lanes and farmland into one of the fastest-developing corridors on the Gulf Coast. Hood’s rode the same wave — every new roof, rental condo, and kitchen remodel passed within sight of the rooster.
What keeps the store distinctive in an age of big-box home improvement is the mix: real contractor-grade supply, a design showroom, and a museum’s worth of oddities on the shelves, all in one building. It is the kind of store where a customer comes in for a doorknob and leaves with a fiberglass elephant, or vice versa. Interior designers — like the local consultant who makes Hood’s her first stop on kitchen redo scouting trips — treat the close-out aisles as a source that competitors can’t copy precisely because nobody else is buying entire collections of vintage Kitty Cars on instinct.
The two Golden Retrievers who serve as greeters complete the picture. At a store built on the principle that curiosity sells, the dogs are, of course, on-message.