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Stew Leonard's (Stew's as it is known locally) is a small chain of grocery stores in Connecticut and New York that Ripley's Believe It or Not! has deemed "The World's Largest Dairy" and that Fortune Magazine has deemed one of the top "100 Best Companies to Work For".
Pretty much everyone who comes from Connecticut or the vicinity knows this landmark grocery store. A typical Stew Leonard's store will attract customers from a wider geographic area than a typical supermarket because its customers are willing to drive longer distances.
The store's fame comes from its innovative in-store marketing, which includes a barnlike wood decor, a winding path for shoppers instead of straight, parallel aisles, and animatronic singing animals perched above the shelving.
Founded in 1969 with seven employees in Norwalk, there currently are also stores in Danbury; Newington; and Yonkers, New York. There are also plans to open stores in Orange, and in Farmingdale, New York.
The store is also known for its customer-service policy, which greets shoppers at each store's entrance etched into a three-ton rock:
1. The customer is always right. 2. If the customer is ever wrong, re-read rule #1.
The store
The New York Times called Stew Leonard's the "Disneyland of Dairy Stores." The stores are not set up like traditional grocery stores; one must walk through the entire store (though there are short cuts). As customers walk through a path of aisles, they are greeted by different employees dressed up in costumes and by animatronic favorites such as Twinkie the Kid, the Chiquita banana, and Clover, a cow's head that moos when one pulls its rope. The stores also feature petting zoos and outdoor cafes in the warmer months and sell a variety of prepared meals year round. Customers are also offered an unusually large number of food samples for a supermarket, as well as free drink samples.
The business
Stew Leonard's is not only the world's largest dairy store; it is also in the Guinness Book of World Records for having "the greatest sales per unit area of any single food store in the United States." It has been listed as one of Fortune Magazine's top 100 businesses to work for seven years in a row. It currently has annual sales of around $300 million and has about 2,000 employees. Stew Leonard's also claims "Hello, from over 3,000 cows in Ellington!" (their own farm) on its milk cartons.
The store has a clone in South Florida called Penn Dutch with locations in Hollywood and Margate. The owners of Penn Dutch visited Stew Leonard's to get merchandising ideas.
Tax fraud
In 1993, Stew Leonard, Sr. was convicted of committing a $17 million tax fraud through an elaborate scheme to divert more than $17 million in cash register receipts over a ten-year period.1 He was sentenced to 52-months in jail. Court documents indicated that Stew Leonard, Jr. played a role in the tax fraud.2 However, in the interest of protecting his son and the store, Stew Leonard Sr. pleaded guilty in exchange for an agreement from the prosecutors to not bring charges against Stew Leonard Jr.3
External links
Comments
This article uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stew_Leonard's. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with this wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.Footnotes
1. [http://www.stewleonards.com/news/hour_profile_stew_smnews.cfm Fresh milk products and great customer service at Stew Leonard's!
2. Back From The Brink Everybody knew grocer Stew Leonard as America's king of customer service-crowned by none other than Tom Peters. But Leonard went to jail for tax fraud. Now...
3. Back From The Brink Everybody knew grocer Stew Leonard as America's king of customer service-crowned by none other than Tom Peters. But Leonard went to jail for tax fraud. Now...
