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Small, Local Ventures Are This Town's Lifeblood [BusinessWest](BusinessWest Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) If you have been into Tailgate Picnic any time in the last 22 years, there's a pretty good chance that Jack and Alicia Magri helped you pick out a bottle of wine, or made the perfect suggestion for your lunch that day. They're the husband-and-wife owners of this market and deli in South Hadley, one of the longtime anchors of the Village Commons across from Mount Holyoke College, and almost every day they have been serving the community that they call home. That's what it means to be a family-run operation, said Alicia. "A lot of people might not understand how important it is to support the locally owned businesses in your towns. But places like this buy locally, shop locally - we are often the first job for a lot of the community's kids. "Family-owned businesses are in trouble right now in America," she continued. "Either you want them like everyone says they do, and you patronize them, or they disappear. It's as simple as that, unfortunately." In many ways, the sentiment is a recurring theme in this suburban town. There is a pocket of industry along the southern edge near the Connecticut River that is, by all accounts, thriving. Intelicoat, E-Ink, and other, smaller commercial ventures are stable stalwarts in their own industrial sectors. But South Hadley is a small town that maintains the distinct neighborhoods that have forged strong individual identities over the last century. And for many, the locally owned, family-run businesses are still the stores and services that provide the town with much more than what is on the shelves. Next door to Tailgate, as everyone here calls it, is another legacy. The Odyssey bookshop has had an almost mythic history, springing up from the ashes of devastating fires not once, but twice in its 48 years. Joan Grenier took over from her father, Romeo, after the second conflagration threatened to end the bookstore's story. She told BusinessWest that she never intended to be the owner of the business that her father created, but that when the time came, she understood the importance of the aptly named Odyssey as a center for books, but also the culture that supports them. Headed down College Street, toward the Falls section of South Hadley, another historic family business has settled into its new home. Veryl's Automotive may strike a chord in the memories of generations of motorists from Holyoke, but when the time came to rethink their business model, they shifted gears across the river. Jeff Poirier is the third generation to run the shop his grandfather built that bears his name, and for him, maintaining cars in a small town means maintaining a relationship that goes above and beyond the service bay. "Some people might think it's hard when you live, work, and have kids all in the same small town," he said. "You're held accountable on a daily basis for everything that you do." For this, the latest in its Doing Business In series, BusinessWest looks into the storefronts of South Hadley, and how the town is looking to the past, as well as the development that has taken place on its riverfront, as a means to shape future commercial growth. Food for Thought It's another busy afternoon at Tailgate, and a line of patrons stretches out the door to get their signature sandwiches and homemade salads and baked goods. College professors rub shoulders with construction workers, and for Jack and Alicia Magri and their crew, this is business as usual. But in many respects, maintaining that business is more difficult now than it's ever been. Food costs have skyrocketed, and Alicia said she refuses to compromise the quality or quantity of her offerings. "That's what we're known for," she added. "We have a unique brand here that no one else could offer. No one has sandwiches like we do, and that's what people tell us every day." Jack himself comes from a long history of food merchants - his father owned and operated the Magri's grocery store in Holyoke. Over the course of recent years, he has had a series of operations to remove a succession of brain tumors. In spite of it all, he and Alicia still make it to work every morning. "When you own your own store," he shrugged, "that's just what you have to do to make it work." Reflecting on his place in South Hadley's close-knit business community and the continuation of a tradition, he said, "older people come into the store, and they remember my father's store. It's nice to have that connection to community history. "These days, though, times are a little different," he continued. "People might be so busy with their work and their family lives that they don't always have the time to run into their friends and neighbors. But they do when they come in here to get a coffee, a sandwich, a bottle of wine. It offers a chance for people to connect above and beyond just being a market. They chit-chat, then they go on their way." Food service is an industry that faces increasing pressure not only from rising costs, but also ever-escalating competition, much of it national in nature. And it is here that Alicia said that Tailgate works hard to keep ahead of the rest. "Over the years you do have to continue to reinvent yourself," she explained, "and to address the changing nature of how people live, we are going to start doing takeout dinners, so people can stop in after work, not have to wait in line, and have homemade meals ready to pick up and reheat at home. "And while they're here," Jack added, "this is the place to buy their bottle of wine, loaf of bread, gallon of milk - all the essentials." While it might not seem like a big decision for many, to make the conscious choice to skip the megastore in favor of the mom-and-pop operation is a practice that Alicia believes has wide-ranging implications for a community like South Hadley. "In many cases, it's not a huge profit margin for these smaller family-owned businesses," she said. "But remember that the money you spend here stays here. The only way we're going to reinvent the local economy, like everyone talks about on the news, is to support your local businesspeople." Read All About It In these days of not just Amazon, but also e-book readers like the Kindle, what happens to the brick-and-mortar bookstore? Well, according to Grenier, reinvention is the key to keeping the pages turning. The bookstore hosts more than 125 events per year, she said, ranging from children's readings to adult gatherings. The Odyssey also sells art supplies and textbooks to Mount Holyoke College, and this season, it is going to begin renting out textbooks, a growing trend in the industry. But for many, the store itself is the big draw. Grenier credits her committed staff to creating an atmosphere that simply cannot be duplicated online or via handheld electronics. "You walk around the store, you'll see lots of blurbs - book reviews - and people come in looking for that," she said. "They're looking for knowledge. "There are something like 50,000 books printed every year, and to sift through that - well, independent booksellers in this regard become curators," she continued. "People want suggestions from someone that they trust. You can see people reading those tags, getting to know us through our choices and what we have to say." While the Odyssey maintains a 21st-century presence via the common forms of online social media - Facebook, Twitter, et al - the legacy Grenier's father created continues within the walls of this oasis of the printed word. "For us, it's about putting together many different things," she explained. "It's not just about selling books - we're really providing entertainment, on many levels." As her industry grapples with the rapidly changing face of publishing and the sale of the written word, she said her store will continue to do what it has always done. "We're still in the business of bringing readers and writers together - any form that takes." Community Action Plan Veryl Poirier opened his first gas station back in 1947, leaving a $1 per hour job in the Holyoke mills. "He didn't know much about cars back then," his grandson joked, "but he did know what people wanted." The shop was a fixture in downtown Holyoke for decades until the time came for Jeff and his father, Denis, to make a decision: rent and gas prices were going up, forcing the Poiriers to take a hit on already-low margins on fuel, and the opportunity to buy an existing business arose across the river. Even though the switch meant that gas was to be eliminated from their offerings, Poirier said it was an easy decision. "People looked at a gas station as not on the same playing field as a dealer or large repair shop, even though we could do everything they could," he explained. And, indeed, the shop can perform warranty-grade repairs and maintenance on all makes and models, and the value-added benefit is that Poirier sees his clientele on an almost daily basis out in the community. "You become known in your town," he explained. "My business model is to have people get their cars repaired here, and to make it easy for them." Poirier's is another example of a committed small business - the kind that many in South Hadley would like to see more of. Bob Judge chairs the Board of Selectmen, and one morning he sat down with BusinessWest in the Egg and I, a popular breakfast restaurant in the older Falls section of town, to tell how the future of South Hadley depends a great deal on its historic underpinnings. He gestured out the window toward Main Street and the overgrown banks of the Connecticut River just below the Holyoke Dam. "The new opportunities that we seek in the Falls will tap the enviable location we have on the river," he said. "This restaurant has been here for a long time," Judge continued. "It's an example of a business in SH Falls that's key to the current economic balance in terms of old, established businesses that serve the people in town, but also what we see as the key toward greater economic revitalization. You've got to keep your existing businesses strong in order to attract new. "Like many small towns in New England," he went on, "our historic Main Street has suffered over the decades as shoppers move towards malls in particular. So we've got to preserve our local businesses any way we can." To that end, the town has recently revitalized the Beachgrounds recreational park, and there is work underway to do the same for another stretch of riverfront property, where the nation's first navigable commercial canal, dating to the 1790s, lies unseen under a centuries-old tangle of weedy growth. Gatehouse Park, as that stretch will be known, is to be one end of a riverfront series of green space, with plans for a $10 million library to be built. One building on that site is an existing historic structure that Judge said would ideally be put back onto the tax rolls. "The goal is that a developer would look across the street at this beautiful library building taking shape," he said, "and then at the existing neighborhood that lies within walking distance. And then, amid all these riverfront properties, the hope is to look at what is in between. "The center will always have economic strength by virtue of Mount Holyoke College," he continued, "but it's this part of town that needs the infusion of a few more anchors to moor the ship of economic development and growth." South Hadley remains a solid community, with family businesses holding firm despite the changing nature of the economy around them. Judge pointed to the architect's rendering of the library building, in the style of an old mill, and said, "sure, there are other towns on the Connecticut river, but none with the history we have." He referred to the historic spaces of the town, but could just as easily have been speaking to the family businesses that have called South Hadley home for decades. "We are incredibly fortunate," Judge said, "to have these unique assets." (c) 2011 BusinessWest |