Giving People What They Want

Ms Trestman’s comments in the February issue about having a grocery store in Norfolk brought back some horrible memories to my wife, Louise Schimmel, and me.
What ended as Dina’s started in 1996 as Greenwoods Market and Café. We kept it going for three very long years.
Our basic assumption was, that besides providing some staples, as well as a café where residents could have a sufficient breakfast or lunch, other items of a more sophisticated nature were needed in order to have enough margin to at least break even. This point never came, save for a few splendid summer months.
Another assumption was that it could be operated on an absentee basis. We had great employees and some whom we wish we’d never met.  The absentee owner who lacks a manager exercising strong and efficient control is lost. We believed that a talented and reliable manager could manage a staff as well as do the cooking for the breakfast and lunch trade. We never had that for any appreciable time. I’d grown up in the food business and my experience was that employees were loyal and hardworking. Alas, my experience occurred some 25 years before Greenwoods Market and Café was born and it happened in another part of the country. This was no job for an absentee owner (even though, as things devolved, these owners were putting in over 60 hours per week between them, while holding other jobs).
It was the café portion of the operation that produced the most revenue. But what an awakening it was to find that shepherd’s pie was always a roaring success. A country pate plate was considered downright strange. We were forced into the realization that, for the most part, the Norfolk palate was undemanding. And so we stuck to the soup, sandwich and ‘normal’ lunch formula at noontime and egg/ham/mayonnaise grilled sandwiches or pastries in the morning.
It was a constant battle to get suppliers to come to us. We thought it grand that artisan bread arrived before opening each day, from Stamford. For a while we had a supplier of Italian specialty items. We got a cheese delivery weekly, from New York. Fresh milk came daily, produce came twice a week. But, it was a struggle when the orders stayed at low volume. Suppliers became more and more reticent to bring us our small orders. Some refused to come because we were on neither Route 7 nor Route 8. To us, it was a matter of the community not responding sufficiently. To the community (excluding those loyal customers who bought real bread daily, took home cheese and produce on a regular basis and who had a meal every now and then) it was “who needs this stuff”? No matter what they may otherwise express, people will buy most of their ‘basics’ at the larger stores where everything costs less, often justifying the trip by doing other errands or shopping at the same time.
Ms Trestman suggests that a market will succeed if it just ‘gives people what they need.’ The problem is that each person needs something different, and there is not enough critical mass of any one ‘need’ to support a market in a town of 1,600 people.
We kept hoping that a breakthrough would arrive. Three years were enough for us. It is educational to remember that the next owner (to whom we sold the business) had professional market research done before buying. He closed in less than one year.
Successfully running a small market in Norfolk, unless the citizenry has undergone some transformation both in taste and volume, would be impossible. It is (and for me was) a great idea. But it can’t be done.
Louis Salamone