The last year has been hell on big business in ways we hear of on a daily basis, and perhaps it’s true that what’s bad for Enron, WorldCom, Andersen, et al is bad for the country. But how about small business? How has the downturn affected neighborhood storekeepers who do their own books and don’t use surveys to determine customer satisfaction? We asked these south-side proprietors if they’d been affected by the fallout from September 11.
Audrey Chesta opened Village Video in 1981, when VCRs were state-of-the-art and customers would rent practically anything that would play inside them. “The worst horror movies,” she says, “like Microwave Massacre.” (The box, she recalls, displayed a head in a microwave and a person waving a knife and fork.) “Just terrible stuff–stuff that people made in their basement. But people were so excited by the technology.” DVDs haven’t created anywhere near as much enthusiasm, not on the south side, anyway. Suppliers from the coasts might talk them up, she says, “but I think they forget where we are. People are more conserv–more sensible here.
Diran Soulian returned home from Korea in September 1953 to find his parents waiting with some news: it was time to move out. They were ready to sell their restaurant at 79th and Morgan and were looking to move to Beverly. “In the next three months we planned to get the new place, we found it, and we opened on January 9, 1954.” The place was an immediate success, he says. Since then he’s opened two more locations: in Oak Lawn in 1988 and in Orland Park in early 2001. Beverly and Oak Lawn are holding their own; “in Orland, we’re paying bills.” The three stores, taken together, employ 90 people.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
For an independent, family-owned grocery store to survive in a world of chains, paying attention is key. Tom Baffes, who was a year old when his father Bill opened County Fair Foods in 1964, says that’s one thing his dad taught him. “He’s always said if you run one store well enough, you’ll make as much money as you would in two or three, because when you have your mind on the other stores, you’re losing what you could have done in one.” Though his father doesn’t work full-time anymore, he’s active in the business and a role model. “He enjoys it a lot. He’s 66, but you wouldn’t know it from talking to him.
10150 S. Indianapolis
3031 W. 111th
