Folklore retailer Stew Leonard Sr. expanded his eponymous store into a merchandising mecca, filling it with petting zoos and livestock singing machines.He died Wednesday in a Manhattan hospital. was 93 years old.
The cause was complications from pneumonia, said his son Stewart Jr.
In 1969, Leonard opened his first store in Norwalk, Connecticut. The store was built around a bottling plant, so it was a destination that promised fresh milk. “To get it fast, you’d have to get a cow,” his ad proclaimed.
Brian Miller described it in The New York Times as “the Disneyland of dairy stores.” It was called “the world’s largest dairy store” in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”. It was also recognized by Guinness World Records for having the highest sales per square foot of retail space.
Business Insider praised Kroger’s customer loyalty program and Wegman’s walk-in beer lockers in 2015, but anyone who’s ever set foot in Stew Leonard said, “It’s way better than the rest.” I know,” he concluded.
The magazine listed 13 reasons why Stew Leonard’s is “Truly America’s Best Grocery Store.” The first is our Customer Service Policy. “Rule 1: The customer is always right. Rule 2: If the customer is wrong, reread rule 1.”
More than 50 years after the first store opened, Stew Leonard’s has expanded to seven locations and generates $600 million in annual revenue.
Leonard has become Frank Perdue’s largest wholesale chicken buyer. He arranged with a distributor friend to bottle Paul Newman’s salad dressing. The main criterion for employment in the store was a cheerful smile. To keep prices low, the store only stocks about 2,000 items (basic groceries). That’s about 3% of what the chain stores sell.
In 1986, he received the Entrepreneurial Excellence Award from Ronald Reagan.
Leonard retired around 1990, but remained as honorary chairman of the company’s board of directors. Three years later, he was sentenced to prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion for skimming over $17 million in sales from his Norwalk store. At the time, this was the largest computer-driven tax evasion case on record in the country.
Many of his devoted patrons who were later interviewed appeared more sad or disappointed than angry. Leaning back and sobbing, he said: I hurt my children. I have caused trouble for the customer. “
In a phone interview Thursday, Stewart Jr. described fraud as a “small business entrepreneurial mistake.” His father explained his mistake to a retailer in nearby Bradford while serving 44 months of his 52-month sentence at a federal prison in McKean, Pennsylvania. His son said he has mentored entrepreneurs and warned them not to fall into “the traps they can fall into by not putting everything in the cash register.”
Also in 1993, the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection accused Norwalk stores of neglecting products such as chicken, walnuts and tomatoes. Leonard said the weight discrepancy was minimal and has been corrected.
Stewart John Leonard was born in Norwalk on December 1, 1929, to Charles Leonard, a hatter who founded Clover Farms Dairy in the early 1920s, and Anna (Stewart) Leonard, a housewife.
“My childhood dream was to be a milkman,” he told The Times. He graduated from Norwalk High School, but in 1951 while earning his degree from Ratcliffe’s Hicks Agricultural School at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, his father died and he and his brother took over the business. Inherited.
In 1967, he was devastated when the state condemned the construction of a highway on a family dairy farm.
“All I knew was milk,” he said.
“Stew Leonard: My Story” (2009, Scotty Reese), he wrote that he asked Milkroot customers for advice on what to do. He soon purchased a meadow in Norwalk from a widow who was a customer of his father. She agreed to sell only if the young Mr. Leonard agreed to look after the sheep and chickens as well.
They become part of a petting zoo, joining mechanical cows, ducks and various costumed characters as they make their way through the store along wide, winding aisles lined with free offerings from fascinating sample booths. increase.
As Tom Peters and Nancy Austin wrote in Passion for Excellence: The Difference in Leadership (1985), “Don’t tell Stew or his customers that grocery shopping is boring. !”
The store was originally called Clover Farms Dairy, but after a competitor opened a facsimile 20 miles away, Leonard decided to sell the store to Stew after discovering his father had not trademarked the name. Branded as Leonard’s.
The company currently has seven stores in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.
It is run by Stewart Jr. and his brothers Beth Leonard Hollis and Jill Leonard Tavero. In addition to them, Mr. Leonard is survived by his wife Marianne (Guzman) Leonard. Another son, Tom. He has 13 grandchildren, 5 of whom work for the company. and 11 great-grandchildren.
In retail, the “wow factor” drives sales, Leonard said, but caring about the store keeps the business going and growing.
Speaking to The Times in 1983, he drew on a naive maxim from his dairy days. “I still believe that the farmer’s shadow is the best fertilizer.”
