Hubcap Joe's on Kinderkamack

Come on. How many times have you driven past Hubcap Joe's on Kinderkamack road and thought, "I'd love to stop in there." Not because you needed a hubcap, but because on a road punctuated by nail salons, Hubcap Joe's has a unique presence. And a unique story to go along with it.

Joe DeMarco did not find hubcaps, hubcaps found him. Literally. As a young boy visiting his aunt in the Bronx, a hubcap from a Pontiac fell off and rolled right up to him as they made their way towards the El to go shopping.

"The guy in the Pontiac backed-up to look for it, but didn't get out of his car to pick it up and just drove away," Joe said.

DeMarco asked his aunt if he could keep the hubcap, but she told him that they needed to shop first and if it was there on their return he could have it.

"On our way back, there it was," DeMarco said. "So I picked it up and after that I would look for hubcaps that I could collect."

It wasn't long before DeMarco started selling them.

"I was about ten or eleven years old when I started to sell them," he said.

"I would go to food stores and leave my card on the windshields of cars that were missing hubcaps, but then people would call me and accuse me of taking them to re-sell the hubcaps to them, which I wasn't," DeMarco said. "So, I decided to put ads in the newspapers where it was safer."

He continued to collect hubcaps and sell them throughout middle school and high school, where he attended Bergen Catholic.

In high school, DeMarco began to hang around the Bergenfield junk yard for hours on end with the owner's son, who was his age.

"I met people who were looking for hubcaps and I had hubcaps to sell," he said.

Along with other part-time jobs at Paramus Park Mall, Burger King and Bergen Catholic, DeMarco worked part-time at the Bergenfield junk yard, learning all he could about the business and selling hubcaps. When he realized college was not for him, he decided to work full-time for the junk yard.

"It wasn't that I didn't want to go to college," he said. "I just couldn't sit still knowing I could be out there making money--I was always an earner."

It was when the owner of the Bergenfield junk yard announced that he was closing it that DeMarco began to look around for a place of his own where he could hang his shingle and sell his hubcaps. Nineteen years ago he looked at the space he currently inhabits and bought it.

"It was perfect," he said. "Busy road, high visibility, great space and the potential for a good amount of foot traffic."

Although, over the course of the last 20 years foot traffic has been supplanted by on-line orders.

"I saw the way business was going," he said. "And I made an on-line presence early on."

Today, approximately 70 percent of his sales are on-line through his website and eBay.

"I started selling on eBay in 1999 when it was still fairly new," DeMarco said.

Aside from the internet, what changed his business was September 11, 2001. "After September 11, people didn't care about things like missing hubcaps."

That's when he started to notice the real shift from foot traffic to internet traffic. Through internet orders, DeMarco's biggest sales states are Texas, California and Florida.

"Those are the states where I ship a lot of inventory," he said.

As Hubcap Joe turns the corner of 20 years he said, "One of the best decisions I ever made was to buy this building. I'm here to stay."

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