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Stew Leonard Sr., a folkloric retailer who expanded his namesake shops into merchandising meccas replete with petting zoos and mechanical singing livestock, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 93.
The trigger was problems of pneumonia, his son Stewart Jr. mentioned.
Mr. Leonard opened his unique retailer in Norwalk, Conn., in 1969 as a vacation spot that promised recent milk as a result of it was constructed round a bottling plant. “You’d should personal a cow to get it sooner,” his commercials proclaimed.
Bryan Miller described it in The New York Times because the “Disneyland of Dairy Shops”; “Ripley’s Imagine It or Not” called it the “World’s Largest Dairy Retailer”; and it earned a spot within the Guinness World Data for having the very best greenback gross sales per sq. foot of promoting area.
In 2015, Enterprise Insider praised Kroger’s buyer loyalty program and Wegmans’s walk-in beer locker, nevertheless it concluded that anybody who had ever set foot in Stew Leonard’s “is aware of it’s miles above the remaining.”
The journal listed 13 causes Stew Leonard’s was “actually America’s greatest grocery retailer.” The primary was its customer support coverage: “Rule 1: The shopper is all the time proper. Rule 2: If the shopper is ever mistaken, reread Rule 1.”
Greater than 50 years after the primary retailer opened, Stew Leonard’s has expanded to embody seven places incomes $600 million yearly, and it stays family-owned and operated with an enormously loyal buyer base.
Mr. Leonard turned Frank Perdue’s largest wholesale rooster purchaser. He organized with a distributor buddy to bottle Paul Newman’s salad dressing. The shops’ chief criterion for employment was an exuberant smile. To maintain costs low, the shops have stocked solely about 2,000 objects — grocery fundamentals — about 3 p.c of what chain shops promote.
In 1986, he was offered with a Presidential Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence from Ronald Reagan.
Mr. Leonard retired round 1990, however remained chairman emeritus of the corporate’s board. Three years later, he was sentenced to jail after pleading responsible to tax fraud for skimming greater than $17 million in gross sales from the Norwalk retailer; on the time, it was the nation’s largest computer-driven tax evasion case on file.
Lots of his devoted patrons who had been interviewed afterward appeared extra saddened or upset then indignant. At his sentencing, Mr. Leonard, leaning on a metallic cane after hip surgical procedure, mentioned, sobbing: “I’ve damage my household. I’ve damage my kids. I’ve damage my clients.”
In a telephone interview on Thursday, Stewart Jr. described the fraud as “extra of a small enterprise entrepreneurial mistake.” He mentioned that whereas his father was serving 44 months of a 52-month sentence in a federal jail in McKean, Pa., he lectured retailers about his errors in close by Bradford. Since then he had mentored younger entrepreneurs, warning them towards “the entice you possibly can fall into of not placing every part into the money register,” his son mentioned.
Additionally in 1993, the Connecticut Division of Shopper Safety accused the Norwalk retailer of short-weighting clients on objects like rooster, walnuts and tomatoes. Mr. Leonard mentioned the load discrepancies had been minuscule and had been corrected.
Stewart John Leonard was born on Dec. 1, 1929, in Norwalk to Charles Leonard, a hatter who based Clover Farms Dairy within the early Nineteen Twenties, and Anna (Stewart) Leonard, a homemaker.
“My dream ever since I used to be a bit boy was to be a milkman,” he advised The Times. He graduated from Norwalk Excessive College, however as he was incomes a level from the Ratcliffe Hicks College of Agriculture on the College of Connecticut in Storrs in 1951, his father died, and he and his brother inherited the enterprise.
In 1967, the state condemned the household dairy for a freeway, leaving him shattered.
“Milk was all I knew,” he mentioned.
In “Stew Leonard: My Story” (2009, with Scotty Reiss), he wrote that he had requested clients on his milk route for recommendation on what to do. They recommended that he open a retail retailer and, and not using a intermediary, proceed to promote his dairy merchandise on the identical low costs. He quickly purchased pasture land in Norwalk from a widow who had been a buyer of his father’s; she had agreed to promote provided that the youthful Mr. Leonard agreed to deal with her sheep and chickens, too.
They turned a part of the petting zoo, which joined the mechanical cows and geese and numerous costumed characters who’ve welcomed clients as they go via the shop alongside a single large snaking aisle flanked by free choices from tempting pattern cubicles.
As Tom Peters and Nancy Austin wrote in “A Ardour for Excellence: The Management Distinction” (1985), “Don’t inform Stew or his clients that meals procuring is a bore!”
The shop was initially referred to as Clover Farms Dairy, however after a competitor opened a facsimile 20 miles away, and after Mr. Leonard found that his father had by no means trademarked the identify, he branded the shop as Stew Leonard’s.
The corporate now has seven shops, in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.
It’s run by Stewart Jr. alongside along with his siblings, Beth Leonard Hollis and Jill Leonard Tavello. Along with them, Mr. Leonard is survived by his spouse, Marianne (Guthman) Leonard; one other son, Tom; 13 grandchildren, 5 of whom work for the corporate; and 11 great-grandchildren.
In retailing, Mr. Leonard mentioned, the “wow issue” sells, however minding the shop is what retains the enterprise going and rising.
“You’d have to have the ability to keep on prime of it,” he told The Times in 1983, invoking an earthy aphorism from his dairy days. “I nonetheless consider {that a} farmer’s shadow is the very best fertilizer.”
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