“The front of the store reminds me of an outdoor bazaar,” I tell Eric Chaddock, the manager of Ashland’s Shop n’ Cart, a supermarket that caters to a whirling dervish of a demographic that defines the town.
“A circus,” he says with a wry smile and well-earned pride.
“Hmmmm. Maybe,” I allow. But after avoiding the parade of elephants, tail in trunk and trunk in tail, stomping down the aisle past the cookie island and the barrel of pink Himalayan salt chunks while loyal pooper-scooping stockers in forest green hoodies pull up the rear, I find myself ready to concede.
Okay, I’m exaggerating. For the benefit of the Department of Health and my therapist, I see no elephants tromping through the store on a late Thursday afternoon. However, hanging out here, Reporter’s Notebook and pen in hand, I can see Eric’s point:
In the Center Ring, a guy in a wool cap checking out with a half-pound bag of cocoa spots a musician friend one check-out stand over. “I got a ukulele,” he hollers over the hum from the fluorescent lights and a piped in violin concerto—the music here varies from classical to Led Zepellin—“ I’m way into it.”
The other guy is Ben Gaskins, a teacher at the Siskiyou School who once had a ukulele band called Sweetgrass. They talk ukes in front of the ice machine. For a third guy who overhears the conversation, a customer named Phyllos Strinkling, talking about music isn’t enough.
“Hey, I’ve got my ukelele in the van. Anyone want to jam?”
No jam. The others don’t have instruments handy, but Phyllos, a twenty-something who lives in his van with his brother and another guy—all three are gold miners down from Nome—does . (As Phyllos explains, they mine off–shore in the Bering Sea, working underwater in wet suits to separate the gold from the goop that’s dredged from the ocean floor. He opens his flip-phone to show me a picture of a good-sized nugget.) Then he’s back in the store serenading the shoppers until he connects with stocker Sissy McMullin. She recently got a violin for a gift, but doesn’t know how to play.
Phyllos hustles out to the van, and dashes back, this time with a violin. He sets the open case on the floor between a small stand of didgeridoos and an island of tinctures, gives Sissy tips, then plays “Oh Suzanna” and “Dixie.” Between tunes, checker Rebecca, a violinist, calls over from her station, “You need to loosen your bow, it’s too tight.” While Phyllos loosens the bow, another female stocker with a contagious smile hustles by singing the chorus from the Cranberries’ anti-war song, “Zombie, zombie, zombie, hey, hey, hey, hey.” Phyllos is disappointed. He’d love to play with her but she’s too moving too fast to flag down.
Hovering around the handmade Sweep Dreams brooms from Thailand, a rack featuring Midwifery Today and Sage Woman magazines and a mountain of Atta Boy dog food, Marceline Canterbury, 70, picks up on the vibe as the “Zombie”-singing stocker makes another pass. “This is not a boring store,” she says. “The people who work here are always laughing. I’ve never seen a sour face.”
A zombie isn’t a bad metaphor for the supermarket, which was all but dead before a resurrection that began in 1994, says Eric. He and owner Steve Reed first opened Shop n’ Cart at the intersection of Ashland Street and Tolman Creek Road in 1988 as a conventional box store.
“We rolled along until Albertsons built across the street and knocked our socks off,” says Eric. The chain supermarket took 45 percent of their business. Losing money, they tried everything to save themselves, but nothing was working. Then, says Eric, his smile as much a fixture as his close-cropped beard, a woman named Heidi, a sales rep for a natural foods distributer insisted he try focusing on her alternative products. Though his mother shopped and worked at the Ashland Food Co-op while he was growing up, Eric was more than skeptical.
“Basically,” he says, “she insulted me into doing it.” He agreed to experiment, advertising two kinds of organic rice milk at cost, using the product as a “loss leader” to gauge interest. Heidi suggested an initial order of four pallets of the rice milk. That’s 75 cases per.
“I said to her, ‘Are you insane? I don’t sell 10 cases a year.” (In the past, they’d bought it from a conventional source and sold it at an extremely high price.)
“She said, ‘Whatever you don’t sell, I’ll just sell it to the co-op downtown.’ That’s when the bell rang that I’d been missing the boat.”
The rice milk sold swiftly. And, by charting a new course—“We stopped listening to wholesalers and started listening to our customers”—the red ink once again began running black. Key to the strategy was converting conventional customers by pricing natural items “within striking distance” and displaying them close to their conventional cousins.
For me, those delightful dissonances are what give the store its charm. Walking down the aisles, I feel like I’m flipping back and forth between the Home Shopping Network and Planet Green. Besides, if Mr. Clean and Seventh Generation can amicably share shelf space, and if sacred smudges can gaze across to the Hidden Vally Ranch dressing, why shouldn’t be all be able to get along?
And then, there’s the stuff you can find there, sometimes pretty darn odd stuff, at least for a supermarket. And that, says Eric is to the credit of his buyers who are encouraged to be fearless. Which, he says, explains the 100-pound ceramic Buddhas the store once carried. “I saw that a few pallets of them came in one time and it kind of blew me away,” says Eric. To his surprise, they sold out in no time.
Of course, not every buy is destined to be a Buddha-like success. Consider, says Eric, “the seaweed flavored Jello from Malaysia.”
ROSEY ‘ROUND THE ROGUE
Shop ‘n Cart: Ukelele Jam by the Ice Machine
By Alan Rosenberg
“The front of the store reminds me of an outdoor bazaar,” I tell Eric Chaddock, the manager of Ashland’s Shop n’ Cart, a supermarket that caters to a whirling dervish of a demographic that defines the town.
“A circus,” he says with a wry smile and well-earned pride.
“Hmmmm. Maybe,” I allow. But after avoiding the parade of elephants, tail in trunk and trunk in tail, stomping down the aisle past the cookie island and the barrel of pink Himalayan salt chunks while loyal pooper-scooping stockers in forest green hoodies pull up the rear, I find myself ready to concede.
Okay, I’m exaggerating. For the benefit of the Department of Health and my therapist, I see no elephants tromping through the store on a late Thursday afternoon. However, hanging out here, Reporter’s Notebook and pen in hand, I can see Eric’s point:
In the Center Ring, a guy in a wool cap checking out with a half-pound bag of cocoa spots a musician friend one check-out stand over. “I got a ukulele,” he hollers over the hum from the fluorescent lights and a piped in violin concerto—the music here varies from classical to Led Zepellin—“ I’m way into it.”
The other guy is Ben Gaskins, a teacher at the Siskiyou School who once had a ukulele band called Sweetgrass. They talk ukes in front of the ice machine. For a third guy who overhears the conversation, a customer named Phyllos Strinkling, talking about music isn’t enough.
“Hey, I’ve got my ukelele in the van. Anyone want to jam?”
No jam. The others don’t have instruments handy, but Phyllos, a twenty-something who lives in his van with his brother and another guy—all three are gold miners down from Nome—does . (As Phyllos explains, they mine off–shore in the Bering Sea, working underwater in wet suits to separate the gold from the goop that’s dredged from the ocean floor. He opens his flip-phone to show me a picture of a good-sized nugget.) Then he’s back in the store serenading the shoppers until he connects with stocker Sissy McMullin. She recently got a violin for a gift, but doesn’t know how to play.
Phyllos hustles out to the van, and dashes back, this time with a violin. He sets the open case on the floor between a small stand of didgeridoos and an island of tinctures, gives Sissy tips, then plays “Oh Suzanna” and “Dixie.” Between tunes, checker Rebecca, a violinist, calls over from her station, “You need to loosen your bow, it’s too tight.” While Phyllos loosens the bow, another female stocker with a contagious smile hustles by singing the chorus from the Cranberries’ anti-war song, “Zombie, zombie, zombie, hey, hey, hey, hey.” Phyllos is disappointed. He’d love to play with her but she’s too moving too fast to flag down.
Hovering around the handmade Sweep Dreams brooms from Thailand, a rack featuring Midwifery Today and Sage Woman magazines and a mountain of Atta Boy dog food, Marceline Canterbury, 70, picks up on the vibe as the “Zombie”-singing stocker makes another pass. “This is not a boring store,” she says. “The people who work here are always laughing. I’ve never seen a sour face.”
A zombie isn’t a bad metaphor for the supermarket, which was all but dead before a resurrection that began in 1994, says Eric. He and owner Steve Reed first opened Shop n’ Cart at the intersection of Ashland Street and Tolman Creek Road in 1988 as a conventional box store.
“We rolled along until Albertsons built across the street and knocked our socks off,” says Eric. The chain supermarket took 45 percent of their business. Losing money, they tried everything to save themselves, but nothing was working. Then, says Eric, his smile as much a fixture as his close-cropped beard, a woman named Heidi, a sales rep for a natural foods distributer insisted he try focusing on her alternative products. Though his mother shopped and worked at the Ashland Food Co-op while he was growing up, Eric was more than skeptical.
“Basically,” he says, “she insulted me into doing it.” He agreed to experiment, advertising two kinds of organic rice milk at cost, using the product as a “loss leader” to gauge interest. Heidi suggested an initial order of four pallets of the rice milk. That’s 75 cases per.
“I said to her, ‘Are you insane? I don’t sell 10 cases a year.” (In the past, they’d bought it from a conventional source and sold it at an extremely high price.)
“She said, ‘Whatever you don’t sell, I’ll just sell it to the co-op downtown.’ That’s when the bell rang that I’d been missing the boat.”
The rice milk sold swiftly. And, by charting a new course—“We stopped listening to wholesalers and started listening to our customers”—the red ink once again began running black. Key to the strategy was converting conventional customers by pricing natural items “within striking distance” and displaying them close to their conventional cousins.
For me, those delightful dissonances are what give the store its charm. Walking down the aisles, I feel like I’m flipping back and forth between the Home Shopping Network and Planet Green. Besides, if Mr. Clean and Seventh Generation can amicably share shelf space, and if sacred smudges can gaze across to the Hidden Vally Ranch dressing, why shouldn’t be all be able to get along?
And then, there’s the stuff you can find there, sometimes pretty darn odd stuff, at least for a supermarket. And that, says Eric is to the credit of his buyers who are encouraged to be fearless. Which, he says, explains the 100-pound ceramic Buddhas the store once carried. “I saw that a few pallets of them came in one time and it kind of blew me away,” says Eric. To his surprise, they sold out in no time.
Of course, not every buy is destined to be a Buddha-like success. Consider, says Eric, “the seaweed flavored Jello from Malaysia.”
Alan “Rosey” Rosenberg can be reached at alan@roseyroundtherogue.com or 541-778-8949
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