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Corner stores survive by adapting to customers
By Kathleen Dayton
Staff Writer
When Ted Deas left his downtown office on a recent afternoon to pick up a few grocery items for his boss and a sandwich for himself, he didn’t head for Harris Teeter.
“You don’t mention that word in here,” Deas said as he sat his grocery items down on the counter for 84-year-old Robert Burbage to ring up.
Burbage’s, as the store is now known, has been a neighborhood grocery at the corner of Broad and Savage streets since 1880. Burbage bought it in 1961 and has known Deas since he was a little boy shopping for candy. Burbage has operated a number of corner stores in the area since the 1940s.
“I’ve been in business 61 years this month,” Burbage said in January as he rang up some Skittles for five-year-old twins Davis and Mason Leath.
Burbage’s is the only corner store left below Broad Street, although a number of corner groceries still thrive near the College of Charleston and on the East Side.
“I live in Mount Pleasant and I still come here,” Deas said. “Everybody comes here just to catch up on everybody and see what’s going on.”
Burbage and his two sons, Al and Matthew, greet customers by name. Al bought Burbage’s from his father in 1992 and he and his wife live in an apartment above the store.
The Burbage brothers do a number of tasks during the course of the day, including baking cookies, cooking barbecue and cutting meat. The homemade foods they prepare, including the plastic-wrapped broccoli spinach corn muffins arranged in a basket near the cash register, have helped the store diversify its product and find a niche among the city’s many other food retailers, large and small.
The store sells homemade Pluff Mud pie ($1.69), barbecue sandwiches (spicy or mild, $3.59), and Burbage’s fresh ravioli ($7.99-$8.99). Shoppers in this 1,000-square-foot corner store can also grab a can of Comet cleanser or a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau.
“We’ve got to do a lot to survive,” Matthew Burbage said. “That’s what’s kept us going, the things we’ve been cooking. If we’d stayed a grocery store, I don’t know if we’d be here. We just had to adjust.”
He said the store still offered house charge accounts and delivery until Hurricane Hugo hit in 1989. After the hurricane, some downtown residents moved away and damaged homes were bought and restored by affluent people from other states who often use them as second homes.
“Before Hugo, when residents left town they left in summer and went to the beach,” Matthew Burbage said. “Usually somebody was still working downtown and got groceries to take home. Now, when they leave, they go to New Hampshire. They’re gone for a long time. They’re affluent people and they go all over, out West, Europe. Some have a second or third home here and they’re just here for a few weeks.”
Al Burbage said he has to mark up merchandise more than larger chain stores that can buy in bulk, and the distributors and vendors that he uses can’t always provide the products he would like to carry.
“My markup is probably in between that of a convenience store and a grocery store, and probably should be as much as a restaurant,” he said. “If we didn’t own the building, we’d be long gone.”
Vendors hard to find
Around the corner and a block or so down the street, Brent Fields and Charles Hunt are also in the corner-store business. They’ve been operating Queen Street Grocery for 21¼2 years in a store that has been in business since 1922.
Fields’ biggest challenge is trying to find vendors that will sell products cheaply enough so he can make a profit, he said.
“We just can’t buy in surplus like Harris Teeter and other stores,” Fields said.
Business has been getting better every month with the influx of young professionals into the neighborhood. Construction workers and tourists also patronize the store, where fresh hot dogs seem to be the niche. Fields thinks corner stores will always be able to make it in downtown Charleston, he said.
“We’re making enough to pay ourselves,” Fields said. “We get a big lunch rush during the day. It’s just a walker-friendly area. People are much more likely to walk over and get something then to get in the car and drive.”
Competition keeps costs low
The Food Marketing Institute, based in Arlington, Va., reports that competition has never been more vigorous for food retailers, with more than a dozen types of food businesses vying for market share, including superstores, convenience stores and online retailers.
Rigorous competition among more than a dozen types of food retailers has helped contain food inflation to an average of 2.6% annually from 1995 to 2005, the Food Institute reported. The cost of food as a portion of family income has declined tremendously during the long lifespan of some of Charleston’s corner stores, from 50% in the 19th century to 9.9% today.
Lee Batchelder, zoning administrator for the city of Charleston, said he would like to see more corner stores make a comeback as they find their niche and learn how to cater to residents of the city’s various neighborhoods.
“It’s an amenity for people who live in these neighborhoods to have a nice store they can walk to,” Batchelder said. “As the culture of our city has changed and the number of stores has decreased significantly, these buildings in many cases have sat vacant for years or been converted to other uses. We certainly want to keep as many as we can and find appropriate reuses for the others.”
Philip Owens, senior vice president of the Charleston Area Chamber of Commerce, said corner stores are part of the city’s charm.
“I think they just lift the ambiance,” Owens said.
Patty Leath said she brings her twin sons to Burbage’s for a visit two or three times a week as an after-school treat.
“We can walk here from home, and they have a lot of gourmet things here,” Leath said. “We just really want to support a local business like this. It’s a rare thing.”
Kathleen Dayton is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at kdayton@charlestonbusiness.com.
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