Stew Leonard Sr., a folkloric retailer who expanded his eponymous stores into merchandising meccas filled with petting zoos and mechanically singing farm animals, died Wednesday in a Manhattan hospital. He turned 93.
The cause was complications from pneumonia, his son Stewart Jr. said.
Mr. Leonard opened his original store in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1969 as a destination that promised fresh milk because it was built around a bottling plant. “You’d have to have a cow to get it sooner,” his ads proclaimed.
Bryan Miller described it in The New York Times as the “Disneyland of the dairies”; “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” called it the “World’s Largest Dairy Store”; and it earned a place in the Guinness World Records for having the highest sales per square foot of retail space.
In 2015, Business Insider praised Kroger’s customer loyalty program and Wegmans’ walk-in beer vault, but concluded that anyone who’s ever set foot in Stew Leonard’s “knows it’s a cut above the rest.”
The magazine listed 13 reasons why Stew Leonard’s was “truly the best grocery store in America.” The first was the customer service policy: “Rule 1: The customer is always right. Rule 2: If the customer is ever wrong, reread Rule 1.”
More than 50 years after opening its first store, Stew Leonard’s has expanded to seven locations earning $600 million annually, and remains family-owned and operated with a hugely loyal customer base.
Mr. Leonard became Frank Perdue’s largest chicken wholesaler. He arranged with a distributor friend to bottle Paul Newman’s salad dressing. The shops’ main criterion for employment was an exuberant smile. To keep prices down, the stores only stock about 2,000 items — basic items — about 3 percent of what retail chains sell.
In 1986, he received a Presidential Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence from Ronald Reagan.
Mr. Leonard retired around 1990, but remained chairman emeritus of the company’s board of directors. Three years later, he was sentenced to prison after pleading guilty to tax fraud for skimming more than $17 million in sales from the Norwalk store; at the time it was the largest computerized tax evasion on record.
Many of his devoted patrons interviewed afterwards seemed more sad or disappointed than angry. At his sentencing Mr Leonard, leaning on a metal cane after hip surgery, sobbed, “I hurt my family. I hurt my children. I hurt my clients.”
In a telephone interview on Thursday, Stewart Jr. the fraud as “more of a small business entrepreneurial mistake”. He said while his father was serving 44 months of a 52-month sentence in a federal prison in McKean, Pennsylvania, he lectured retailers about his mistakes in nearby Bradford. Since then he has guided young entrepreneurs and warned them about “the trap you can fall into if you don’t put everything in the cash register,” said his son.
Also in 1993, the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection accused the Norwalk store of underweighting customers on items such as chicken, walnuts, and tomatoes. Mr Leonard said the weight differences were miniscule and corrected.
Stewart John Leonard was born on December 1, 1929, in Norwalk to Charles Leonard, a milliner who founded Clover Farms Dairy in the early 1920s, and Anna (Stewart) Leonard, a housewife.
“My dream since I was a little boy was to become a milkman,” he told The Times. He graduated from Norwalk High School, but when he graduated from the Ratcliffe Hicks School of Agriculture at the University of Connecticut at Storrs in 1951, his father died and he and his brother inherited the business.
In 1967, the state censured the family dairy for a highway, leaving it shattered.
“Milk was all I knew,” he said.
In “Stew Leonard: My Story” (2009, with Scotty Reiss), he wrote of asking customers on his milk route what to do. They suggested that he open a store and, without an intermediary, continue to sell his dairy products at the same low prices. He soon bought pasture in Norwalk from a widow who had been a client of his father’s; she had agreed to sell only if the younger Mr. Leonard agreed to look after her sheep and chickens as well.
They became part of the petting zoo, joining the mechanical cows and ducks and various costumed characters who welcomed customers as they walked through the store along a single wide winding aisle flanked by free offerings of enticing tasting booths.
As Tom Peters and Nancy Austin wrote in “A Passion for Excellence: The Leadership Difference” (1985), “Don’t tell Stew or his customers that grocery shopping is a pain!”
The store was originally called Clover Farms Dairy, but after a competitor opened a fax 20 miles away and after Mr. Leonard discovered that his father never registered the name, he renamed the store Stew Leonard’s.
The company now has seven stores, in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.
It is run by Stewart Jr. along with his siblings, Beth Leonard Hollis and Jill Leonard Tavello. In addition to them, Mr. Leonard is survived by his wife, Marianne (Guthman) Leonard; another son, Tom; 13 grandchildren, five of whom work for the company; and 11 great-grandchildren.
In retail, Mr. Leonard said, the “wow factor” sells, but paying attention to the store is what keeps the business going and growing.
“You should be able to stay on top of it,” he told The Times in 1983, citing an earthy aphorism from his dairy days. “I still believe that a farmer’s shadow is the best fertilizer.”
