From Kansas City’s industrial frontier, a heartwarming tale of warehouse warfare

Rain pelts Chuck Mabie's Lexus ES300 as he zooms through the gaudy, hot-pink gates of Warehouse 1.

More than a decade ago, Mabie worked inside these gates, in an industrial park near Interstate 435 and Truman Road, selling pallet racks — steel beams and uprights used to make shelving in warehouses. He learned the business from Warehouse 1 owner Mary Lou Jacoby, a respected Kansas City businesswoman.

Jacoby's business dates back to 1986, when Macy's department store closed its Kansas City warehouse. "What Mary Lou saw wasn't trash," Warehouse 1's Web site explains, "but quality retail ready shelving, storage cabinets and more. These items were already used, but with a little paint, would be just the thing that someone could be looking for to start their own business."

Jacoby pounced. That opportunity helped build Warehouse 1 into "the Midwest's largest used material handling equipment company," according to its Web site. Kansas City's business community has showered Jacoby and her company with accolades, including the Joan Strewler-Carter Women of Influence award in 2007; one of the Top 25 Women-Owned Businesses, in 2005, by The Kansas City Business Journal; and one of the Top 10 Small Businesses of the Year, in 1998, by the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce.

Mabie, however, is a pudgy entrepreneur with a preference for profanity. He burns up the driveway to Warehouse 1, passing rain-soaked stacks of bright-orange steel rack. Mabie isn't impressed. Something about rust huffs from his mouth. His own steel racks and uprights sit in the dry confines of a warehouse right across the street from Warehouse 1.

Mabie turns around and steps on the gas. Signs posted on the way out of Warehouse 1's property thank the company's customers for their business. Mabie stops just before exiting onto East 12th Street to show off the giant "New Pallet Rack Cheap" sign on a chain-link fence facing Warehouse 1's driveway. An arrow points directly to his warehouse, home of Pay Less Material Handling. No one leaves Warehouse 1 without seeing the sign for Mabie's competing business.

"They think I'm doing them wrong," Mabie says of Jacoby and her son, Ron Boone. "But that's a matter of opinion. I'm just trying to build my business."

Last year, Mabie started his own pallet-rack business, leasing a warehouse across East 12th Street from Jacoby's 20-acre complex of metal warehouses and brick buildings.

"They're huge," Mabie says of Warehouse 1. He's right — Jacoby's clients include Dover Air Force Base, Kansas City Power & Light and Sears. "But I can just undercut the shit out of their prices. If we're going head-to-head with each other, I'm not going to lose."

Mabie keeps his overhead low. He employs one man. He doesn't heat his warehouse. He bought a job-site trailer for $500 to use as an office. He didn't even have a bathroom in the warehouse until a few weeks ago. Before, he used a bathroom at QuikTrip.

In the past month, he says, business has jumped. Charts and graphs project more than $1.5 million in sales by the end of the year. Mabie credits the boom to his strategically placed signs.

For three months earlier this year, he planted about a hundred signs near Warehouse 1 and along the corridors of Interstate 435 and Truman Road. Each white sign, about the size of a small political yard sign, reads "New Pallet Rack Cheap" in blue lettering and includes Mabie's phone number.

In early October, the signs began to vanish. The signs were illegally in the right of way, but Mabie says he knew that city workers weren't swiping them; other signs, advertising homes for sale or offers to buy houses, were still up. Plus, Mabie claims that his landlord caught Jacoby pulling his signs and throwing them in her trunk.

Mabie decided to leave Jacoby a message. In small print on one of the signs, he scribbled, "Leave my signs alone, you bitch."

Kansas City's prince of pallet racks grew up in Independence. He has always been a hustler. His mother died when he was 3, so he went to live with his father; then his father died when he was 16. The William Chrisman High School grad went to work and got an apartment.

He managed shoe stores before going to work for Jacoby in 1992. Six years later, he left Warehouse 1 but stayed in the pallet-rack business, working for Industrial Sales and then Mid-America Lift Truck before opening his own business.

But pallet racks aren't his only gig. The 40-year-old also sells outlaw softball bats.

Mabie was a rec-league player who discovered the wickedness of titanium bats in the early 1990s. Because they rocket baseballs at stitch- and skull-splitting speeds, softball organizations started banning titanium from organized play in 1993. Mabie, though, was a titanium junkie. Bat companies quit making them, but Mabie started buying them on eBay. When he saw a vintage titanium bat sell for $2,000 in an auction, he saw a chance to make some money.

"I decided, you know, if they made the bats before, I can make them again."

Mabie wasn't interested in the approval of softball's governing bodies. He just wanted to make a badass bat.

To make his first bat, he says, he reverse-engineered the best titanium bats of the '90s, an effort that put him about $20,000 in the hole. First, he had to find the titanium; then he made prototypes that sent balls into orbit, but their end caps kept popping off. Finally, Mabie offered a couple of guys with engineering experience a piece of the action to help him finish his creation.