Robert Spector - The Mom & Pop Store: True Stories from the Heart of America

THE
MOM & POP STORE

True Stories from the Heart of America

ROBERT SPECTOR

WALKER & COMPANY
New York

For my sisters,

SANDRA SPECTOR GOLDBERG and BARBARA SPECTOR EISNER,
who were there, on the other side of the counter.

There is no man who is not in some degree a merchant;who has not something to buy or something to sell.

SAMUEL JOHNSON (17091784)

CONTENTS

T HE MOM & POP STORE the small, independent trader embodies our most basic and enduring commercial bond. From the wool merchants in the markets of King Hammurabis Babylon in 2000 B.C., to the stand-alone bakeries in eleventh-century France, to the espresso shops on modern-day Main Street, tradethe exchange of goods or currency between buyer and seller is the foundation of civilized society.

Retail, as the writer Christopher Caldwell noted, is the exciting place where the economic order and the social order meet.

Not that any of these thoughts ever crossed my mind as a teenager slicing liverwurst in my fathers butcher shop in the farmers market in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. All I could think about was getting as far away as I could from the boiled ham, chop meat, pigs feet, calves brains, ham hocks, and head cheese that surrounded me. Never once, as I stuffed scraps of raw meat and fat into the grinder to make chop meat, did I think about my contribution to the economic order and the social order, nor did I appreciate the fact that I was sharing this experience with Bob Dylan, whose first job was sweeping the floor of his fathers Zimmerman Electric & Furniture store in Hibbing, Minnesota; or Colin Powell, who worked throughout high school at Sicksers Furniture in the Bronx; or Margaret Thatcher, who made change in her fathers grocery store in Grantham, Lincolnshire; or Paul Newman, who once ran his fathers sporting goods store in Cleveland, Ohio; or Tony Bennett, Warren Buffett, or Maya Angelou. I didnt know that being the son of a butcher placed me in the company of William Shakespeare, Nat King Cole, Marcel Marceau, Antonn Dvork, John Harvard, John Jacob Astor, Julian Schnabel, and Paul Big Pauly Castellano, the late head of the Gambino crime family.

It wasnt until I was almost fifty years old that I finally comprehended how those hours spent behind the counter had shaped my life and granted me the practical wisdom that has guided me ever since. At the time, I didnt even think I was paying attention.

I eventually learned to fully appreciate the impact that the shop had on my extended family (over four decades, Spectors Meat Market directly or indirectly benefited seventeen relatives), and on the lives of our customers. The T-bone steak that my father trimmed, the salami that my uncle sliced, and the rye bread that my mother sold found their way to the dinner tables of homes all over our community. A little bit of the Spectors, as it were, right there on your plate. This was brought home to me during the research of this book, when a high school classmate of my sister Sandra wrote a poem called Memories for their class reunion. Included in the lines written by Ann Romeo Kulick, who lived across the street from the farmers market, was There was Spectors, with rye bread in hand.

A few years ago, I wrote a book called Category Killers about the impact of so-called big-box retailers, such as Wal-Mart, Staples, Best Buy, Petco, and so forth on our consumer culture. Back then, when people asked me what project I was working on, my answer, category killers, produced a blank stare. Whats a category killer? But when I told people I was working on a book about mom & pop stores, practically all of them reacted with a smile because everyone knows what a mom & pop store is. Oh, my grandfather had an Italian bakery, one person said. My uncle was a butcher, said another, or My parents had a tailor shop.

Almost everyone had a personal story about his or her favorite mom & pop store. My doctor, Bill Mitchell, told me about the time when he was eight years old and his mother sent him to the nearby corner grocery store in his Chicago neighborhood to get a quart of milk. This was in the 1950s, when milk came in glass bottles. Bill bought the milk, walked out of the grocery store, slipped on a wet spot, and dropped the bottle onto the sidewalk shattering glass at his feet. As he began to cry (literally over spilled milk), the owner heard him and rushed out of the store to see what was the matter. He gave young Bill another bottle of milk, free of charge. Fifty years after that experience, Bill recalled it as if it were yesterday.

Howard Schultz, the chairman of Starbucks Coffee, told me that when he was a young boy in Brooklyn, I would go to the butcher store with my mom, and the butcher would show her chickens. My mother would say, No, I dont want that one; yes, I want that one. The butcher placed a lot of importance on doing things right for her. After we were done, hed always say, Ill see you next week, Mrs. Schultz. You want to go into a place where youre appreciated, known, and respected.

Growing up, my favorite store was Penns Confectionary, the little shop owned by the parents of my childhood friend Sharon Penn. Penns was located a couple of blocks from my house, in the middle of a modest, tree-lined residential neighborhood. The shop carried a little bit of everything candy, comic books, magazines, greeting cards, and Spalding High-Bounce rubber balls, which were ideal for stickball or stoopball games. Penns centerpiece was a classic soda fountain counter where customers devoured ice cream sodas, fudge sundaes, banana splits, milkshakes, and egg creams. By the time Sharon, the oldest child, was fourteen, her father thought nothing of leaving her to run the store by herself for three or four hours at a time. On many a summer day, Id dribble my basketball down our street, then over to the corner of Lewis Street and Brighton Avenue, to Penns, where Id park myself on a stool at the counter and keep Sharon company as we talked about girls (me) and boys (her). In between the times she was waiting on customers, shed fix me a chocolate malted milk shake (with a raw egg, always), and let me read, for free, the latest Superman and Batman comic books.

It turns out I was having more fun than Sharon was.

When I was fourteen, I never thought about what an awesome responsibility it was to be left to run the store by myself, Sharon Penn Sigmund told me. My father was so interested in getting out of there, if I was nine years old he would have left me there.

And yet, her time working in the shop taught her valuable lessons.

I knew that, even at fourteen, I was capable of running the store for three or four hours on my own. My mother taught me to always be organized and neat. Always recheck everything. Later in life I did surgical scheduling, where you had to be precise, because having the right equipment in the operating room was a matter of life or death.

Mom & pop store is such a familiar expression that it seems to have been around forever, but its a modern term. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the first usage to the December 20, 1962, issue of a publication called the Listener, which was distributed by the BBC in Great Britain: These mom & pop stores certainly do not love the supermarkets.

(By the way, they still dont.)

Over the years, the term has gotten a bad rap. Businesses are belittled as being just mom & pop operations small, insignificant, outdated. Its easy to understand why many people who run mom & pop stores dont want their businesses described that way because they feel it diminishes what they do.