A Story of a Store

This true story was published in "Viewpoints" many years ago. I've been asked for copies many times, so here it is for anyone who wants to see it again, and for new readers as well. Enjoy!

A STORY OF A STORE

by Sally Friedberg Zerker

We would have to open a store. That's what an informal joint family council decided. We didn't know what else to do in the face of our most recent predicament. Not that we knew anything about business or had any capital. But, as they say nowadays, we had "role models" to lead us. We knew many Jewish immigrants without money or experience who had ventured into storekeeping when they had no other means of support. And if the necessary qualification was destitution and despair, we more than adequately met the requirements .

You see, in 1949, my family was in the throws of yet another crisis, which, as I recall, occurred with depressing regularity. But it wasn't simply a matter of money problems this time. Financial difficulty was the least of our worries at this juncture. We had just learned that my father was gravely ill -- stricken with cancer of the marrow -- and we were all still numb from that revelation. The doctor advised that my father not return to his job -- that of a lining-maker for fur coats -- spending long, grinding hours in a polluted, stench-filled, dingy factory in Toronto's garment district. But the awful truth about his illness was kept from him. The doctor and my mother conspired together to effect a "cover-up", which on the whole worked well for my father's state of mind.

Keeping the secret would be difficult but not impossible. But to do so we had to recreate normality even while life had become abnormal. Not a simple matter! It meant that my father participate actively in some line of work to retain his dignity, self-worth and mental well-being. But somehow this work must be flexible enough to adapt to his state of health on any given day. And let's face it! The cover-up aspect was only part of the problem. The other side of this coin was the pressing urgency to find a source of income. My parents still had to make a living!

How to meet all these sundry and various needs? A store! That was the answer. I have to admit that we were lucky that we didn't give this plan more careful and cautious consideration. Had we done so and sought out expert opinion, in all likelihood our enterprise would never have seen the light of day. Accountants probably would have demonstrated that we could earn more by selling our services to outsiders than the pittance we would make working long hours for ourselves. Business executives would have noticed that we had no capital to invest, and without experience and a proven record, who would lend us money? Real estate specialists might well have pointed out that normally landlords are reluctant to lease properties to such novices.

But we didn't ask anyone any questions, largely because we were so ignorant about business that we didn't even know the questions to ask. We ploughed ahead in our blissful backwardness.

My sister Eva's husband came up with a location for our would-be enterprise. Both Eva and Lil were married by then, and my brother and I were engaged to be married. Marital status did not however diminish one's obligation to family undertakings with us. On the contrary, it only meant that additional energy and talents might be harnessed from among those who were absorbed into the family as "in-laws" or even "in-laws-soon-to-be".

My brother-in-law Harold had only recently graduated as a professional accountant and as such represented one of our two "significant" contacts with the business world. The other was my uncle Joe, my mother's brother, who owned a ladies' ready-to-wear store in Brantford, Ontario. Harold serviced the account of a retail furniture business located on one of Toronto's active east-end commercial streets. For some mysterious reason, which we didn't know then and never learned later, a sliver of the furniture store had been shaved off on one side and been transformed into a bit of independent retail space, with its own front door and its own display window. The furniture storekeeper was willing to lease us that slice for fifty dollars a month.

Picture, if you will, this prospective shop! Street-side it was about eight feet wide, although slightly wider in the interior. Allowing three feet for the entrance way left a window frontage of approximately five feet. (As you might imagine, our store-to-be was dwarfed by the neighbouring furniture emporium). Front to back, the space measured twenty feet at its deepest point. We are therefore talking about something under two hundred square feet of empty space, and "empty space" is precisely what we got when we rented the store. It came to us empty of everything else but this small amount of space. There was no water, no heating, and no toilet facities. I suppose we should have been thankful that the place was at least wired for electricity.

Renovate, you say! Who could afford it? So we had to manage without these vital accommodations. As long as the neighbouring furniture store was operating in the black and was therefore open during business hours, we were permitted to use its facilities. It boasted both a toilet and a tap, although these were hidden away in a distant, cob-webbed, dusty attic (not so easy to find or so pleasant to use, but available). However, some months after we opened our store, the furniture business next-door went bankrupt, and the bailiffs locked the owners -- and incidentally, us too -- out of the premises.

Then we had to become more imaginative to satisfy our basic drives. We pestered other storekeepers with our requests, guarding against overtaxing any one single merchant too often or too regularly. Sometimes we walked to one of the last remaining public washrooms in the city, two blocks away. It was a pretty repulsive place, but in desperation it would do. The most ingenious solution was found by my gentle, dignified mother-in-law. For two whole weeks when she helped out during one Christmas season (as I said, in-laws were soon pulled into the family endeavour), she simply didn't eat or drink on the job, and so avoided the problem altogether.

As for the heating the place, we managed to find a relatively easy solution. Somehow (I've forgotten how) we acquired an ancient, box-like electric heater which soon found its place nestled against one end of the counter (of which more later). Let no one conclude from this that this instrument warmed us through on a cold wintry day. However, by slowly turning one's body, one could heat up bits at a time; first the backside, turn, then the frontside, shift, the feet next, switch, the hands now, and so on, and so on. That heater also served more than one function. In effect it was our kitchen, my father used it for his lunch tabletop, and generally, we hovered around it. You might say it was the focal point for this eccentric new home of ours.

But let me not get ahead of my story. Without benefit of agents or lawyers, my father closed a deal to lease the space. Our total available "investment capital" at that time amounted to the princely sum of $230.00. Even in 1949 one couldn't get very far on that amount of money. Out of that collective saving we were supposed to buy stock and pay for fixtures on which to rest or hang the expected merchandise. Mind you, we still didn't know whether the goods we would be offering for sale would need hanging or stacking, because we started out without the vaguest idea about the character of our future store.

Nevertheless, my mother hired a handyman who built us a masonite counter and some clothes racks made from iron plumbers' piping. He also constructed three wooden shelves which lined the wall behing the counter, and a masonite partition which was to serve as a dressing room, should the need arise. All together, these fixtures took $130 out of our capital fund.

The idea for a fitting room came about when we learned that we might have an opportunity to buy the kind of garments customers could expect to try on before purchasing. That dressing room was symbolic of our ignorance and naivety as business people. Not one of our family had the imagination to add a hook on the wall, let alone build a shelf to assist those in the process of changing. As a result, fitting an item in our store degenerated into a series of fumbling manoeuvres between the salesperson and the customer, where disrobed clothes passed back and forth, from hand to hand, without the relief of a resting place for bags, underwear, or any other items. It was not an elegant scene!

But nevermind! We did have a location and some fixtures! Now we needed merchandise. But what kind? Notice that after paying for the equipment we were left with a grand total of $100 with which to start off as entrepreneurs. Uncle Joe arranged for my parents to talk matters over with one of his friends, a highly successful manufacturer of ladies' dresses, who offered them the wisdom of his experience. He advised them to specialize, and probably to do so in the ladies' ready-to-wear field. They thanked him for his kindness and for his counsel, and proceeded to disregard it entirely. Instead of specializing, they bought anything they could lay their hands on with the limited amount of money at their disposal. It all depended on what came their way by way of credit or consignment arrangements. So what if tablecloths and dated cocktail dresses didn't seem to fit into any common classification! Consistency or image was the least of their worries under the circumstances.

In this way there was assembled a strange and wonderful assortment of items for opening day. For example, we purchased bundles of undyed blanket ends from a mill near Brantford, courtesy of Uncle Joe's contacts. These came in bales and were priced by the pound. All the ends were the full width of a blanket, but they varied in length from a few inches to several feet. Since we bought them by the pound, we weighed each and every piece separately and marked up 33%. We wouldn't dream of rounding off to the nearest dime, nor of boldly risking an educated estimate, even after tediously having weighed hundreds of ends. These ends -- we hoped -- would appeal to our potential clientele in the vicinity of our store who, by and large, were working class people whose earnings hovered around minimum wage (or thereabouts) in such local factories as Lever Brothers and Reliable Toy. The blanket ends did indeed prove to be a very popular item because for a dollar or two, by sewing several pieces together, one could make up a serviceable, warm bedcovering.

I remember that we displayed this part of our merchandise stock on an enormous, round, old wooden table that we borrowed from our neighbouring furniture store. It was placed smack in the middle of the store, without concern for cramping our floor space. On the contrary, at the outset, we had more space than we had knew how to fill. We tried to disguise our barren holdings by spreading those we had as far as possible. That's why we hung some blouses or nightgowns in front of the empty sheves, so that customers might not notice their emptiness. Looking back, I'm sure we didn't fool anyone, but at the time it made us feel better.

Another interesting addition to our assorted selection of merchandise came about as a result of a fashion revolution. Just before we started up in business, women's hemlines dropped drastically, not gradually and sensibly, but rather from knee-length to ankle-length almost overnight, to the dismay of many manufacturers and retailers in the trade. Manufacturers who were caught holding stocks of the short-length goods found these to be virtually worthless -- worthless, that is, unless they learned about our existence. We found that many of our customers scorned the newest craze. We sold hundreds of shorter skirts for 99 cents a piece, and some with expandable waistbands we redefined as maternity skirts, and charged $1.49. We also sold over 300 short-length camel hair coats by reassigning their fashion role; we called them shorty coats and sold them for $6.95. At that price they were a spectacular buy and sold easily.

And so, a miscellaneous stock was rounded up by taking whatever could be had at a low enough price or on tolerable terms. We tossed around names for this unusual operation, and finally came up with one that would both inform the public and and at the same time play a joke on us. We called it the Big Bargain House, as if to say; yes, the shop might be tiny but the savings here will be huge. (You should appreciate too, that in 1949, discount houses and plazas were unheard of, at least in Toronto. We didn't know it, but we were in the forefront of the discount movement.)

Opening day could now be scheduled. We chose a Tuesday for that momentous event because, according to Jewish folklore, Tuesday is supposed to be a lucky day. That first business day, as I awoke with an expectant nervousness, I was met by one of those dismal, persistent, wet downfalls that chills through the bones. My mother, trying to be optimistic, found consolation in the rain, declaring it yet another sign of good luck, an "old country" superstition. Rain hardly seemed a good omen to me. But I was wrong and folklore was right.

From the moment we unlocked the front door, customers kept up a steady pace, looking us over and buying some of our bargains. On that first day, we took in $150. In effect, we had practically sold out our entire stock on opening day. And that pattern repeated itself on the following days. Then the race was on to keep one day's supply of merchandise ahead. Every morning, my mother, and/or father (depending on how well or ill he felt), and/or my sister Lil, scavenged the factories on Spadina for clearances or discounted goods of any sort, while I minded the store, neglecting my classes at the university.

There was only one criterion that our "buyers" had to consider; was the wholesale price low enough for the retail price to be an attractive bargain? In truth, we were literally cleaning out the junkyards of Toronto's garment district. We bought and sold ratty-looking fur coats, soiled and faded sweaters with runs in the fabric, about a hundred ®MDUL¯dozen®MDNM¯ yellowed and short slips, brown childrens' stockings that no sensible child wore anymore since the advent of leotards, and many other such dated, defective merchandise. Too often, on hindsight, I know now that we overpaid for this "garbage", because the wholesaler took advantage of our gullibility and inexperience. But we soon learned to deal only with people who gave fair value for our money. It speaks well for our salesmanship that we could sell almost anything. But that was partly due to our pricing policy which followed the dictum that there's always a customer for anything and everything at some low enough price.

My father was by far the best buyer in the family; he turned out to be a natural businessman. Manufacturers liked to deal with him despite his custom of offering them a fraction of their asking price. That's because he made it a practice to clear the whole lot, even when the lot amounted to 300 blouses of one size and colour, or a batch of dresses that other storekeepers had found to be unsaleable. He was confident that somehow the women in his family would find ways to move his purchases. And we did! Sometimes we did it by modelling the clothes while we worked, but mainly we managed to move the merchandise by giving our customers the best deal around.

It is hard to describe the elation we felt that first day in business. We had been cautioned by Uncle Joe not to expect too much at the beginning. It would take time to build a clientele, he warned. But that's not how it worked out. When Joe telephoned at the close of opening day, he was astonished and delighted that his forecast was wrong. It was as exciting for him as for us to think that this hapless bunch of novices, in this ill-fitted outlet, with no start-up capital, seemed about to make a go of it.

Yet there was still one very serious problem to be overcome before we could feel confident that we were on the road to success. Our family had always observed traditional Jewish religious practices, which meant that we didn't work on our Sabbath, which began at sundown on Friday and lasted until sundown the following day. Accordingly, the store would be closed on Saturdays, the day retailers considered the best of all business days in the week. In those years, workers received their pay envelopes with their weekly wages in cash on Friday, and studies showed that most of their expenditures were made over the next 24 hours.

No wonder then that those businessmen who had our best interests at heart and heard about our plan to remain closed on Saturday tried to talk us out of that "mad" scheme. One of those worried advisors was my fiance's father. He was a very experienced entrepreneur, who had been in the dress business for most of his life, and he couldn't believe that our store could survive without the best business day of the week. Still, according to my parents' set of beliefs, there was no alternative. To give up observance of the Sabbath in order to make the store a success would negate the purpose of the store. Also, they had always taught us that we could remain true to the faith in Canada, if only we had the will and determination to do so. They were not about to go back on their own maxims.

My future father-in-law may well have wondered about the reliability of his son's intended family. But he put aside whatever doubts may have troubled him and tried to minimize the damage that we obviously were choosing to impose on our endeavour. Knowing that when we had locked up on Friday afternoon we had placed a notice on the store door announcing our intentions to re-open at 6 p.m. the following evening, and since he had a car and we did not, he offered to transport us to our distant location as quickly as possible after the onset of sundown. He wanted to reduce travel-time for us, even while I know he thought the need to do so somewhat demented.

As we drove up that first Saturday night and parked in front of the store, we saw a sizeable group of people milling about the Big Bargain House. Were these people forming themselves into a queue? If so, for what purpose? It hardly seemed likely that this gathering had anything to do with us, I thought. But, to my own incredulity, I watched the crowd push its way through our narrow entrance as we unlocked the front door of the shop.

If we were astonished -- and we were -- my father-in-law was dumbstruck. All night long, while we served our customers, he hung around, watching, wondering, and shaking his head in disbelief. For him the whole scene was inconceivable, first, because our store with its hodge-podge of fixtures, stock, and amateurish window display seemed an unlikely magnet for such appeal. It didn't fit his previous, considerable wisdom about the retail world. Secondly, he had never before seen shoppers out on Saturday night. This was unheard of in Toronto at that time. Yet, despite everything, customers had awaited our return. Why? He had no answers. But he was sure of only one thing. Whatever we had done thus far and however the store looked, we must leave it exactly as is. Don't improve on anything, he advised. Don't use professional window dressing equipment or assistance, don't buy paper bags (which of course we didn't have), don't specialize the merchandise, and don't improve the fixtures. Leave well-enough alone, said my father-in-law.

That first Saturday night, without aid of bags, string or wrapping paper, with one hapless dressing room, and with hardly any stock, our tally was close to $150. Now I know that a hundred and fifty dollars may not seem like the world, even taking account of the value of money in 1949, yet it was the world to me. Because it meant that the Sabbath hurdle was cleared. It was a miraculous answer to our very urgent family problems.

From beginning to end, our store had about it an air of wonder and surprise. Amazingly, it satisfied all the requirements we had set out for it. My father was able to work and to prove himself in a way that he'd never had the opportunity to do before. He was not only an astute buyer, he also had the vision to invest a little of the profits, although the other members of the family were discouraging.

Here's how that happened. It was my father's habit to take leisurely walks along Queen Street when business was slow, the weather was fair, and he felt well. On one of those excursions, he notice a store-front property for sale, located about two blocks east of the Big Bargain House. I was unenthusiastic, as were my siblings, because we thought our existing location was commercially superior to the proposed new site. Nevertheless, my father resisted all our negative opinions and proceeded with the purchase, at approximately $18,000. The Big Bargain House was going to move.

We relocated into a much larger space, with two proper fitting rooms (including hooks, shelves and even a spare chair), quite classy fixtures, a cash register (second-hand), some real mannekins for the window (also second-hand), a stock room, and a kitchen in the rear. Overhead was a self-contained apartment whose rent covered most of the maintenance costs for the building. It was this feature which convinced my father that he could afford to gamble on buying his own place. And we still attracted customers, even though we were slightly off the beaten-track. They had seen past the "shlock" of the little store to recognize the values we offered, and so they continued to seek us out in the new location.

Time passed. The year was 1956; the Big Bargain House was seven years old. Much had changed in the family during those years. With the exception of my youngest sister Pearly who was just out of her teens and a university student, we had all become parents ourselves. We were therefore tied down to families and careers, and so we couldn't give as much time to the store as we had in the beginning. As a result, the tasks of buying, selling, and lugging heavy parcels while travelling around the city by streetcar was left more and more exclusively to my parents. In addition, they were planning to move further away from the store -- a northward move in line with the Jewish community trend of that era -- and to be closer to their children's families. That change was bound to sap their energies even further, since it would mean a two-hour trek to the store's location in the south-east end of Toronto. We were all quite worried about their future as they were about to undertake this new step in their lives.

It was at just this juncture that my father informed us that someone had approached him about selling the building. I should tell you that the commercial real estate market was in recession at that time, and that our store's particular area was among the most depressed sections of the city, since that was where the then high levels of unemployment were directly felt. That's why I was surprised that someone had singled out our store from so many other better-situated properties.

However, I was not only surprised, I was also suspicious. The individual who was making the proposal to my father claimed to be a private representative of an anonymous client, and he wouldn't tell him anything about himself or his client. But, he maintained, this secrective purchaser was prepared to pay in cash at a good price. This proposition therefore seemed so far-fetched -- nice, but far-fetched -- that I thought my father was wasting his time. Nevertheless, my father took the man at his word, gave him and his proposal a serious hearing, and the man returned with a written offer, just as he said he would. And the deal was struck. But, still, the client's identity remained a secret.

It all happened so fast that my parents weren't too sure how they were going to dispose of the stock, nor whether they had allowed themselves sufficient time to do so before the closing date. Well, the angel appeared the next day with another timely offer. His client, it seemed, wanted immediate possession. So, he was now directed to purchase the stock for $5000, if my parents were prepared to hand over the keys then and there. Hurried telephone calls ensued, between the store, our homes, and Harold's (he was the accountant, remember) office.

By now, I was beginning to visualize this man with a halo and sprouting wings. You cannot imagine what a relief it was not to have to mobilize everyone in the family for the monumental job of selling off the stock. It would have meant weeks of slugging to clear out the stockroom, which in many ways was an accumulation of seven years of rejected merchandise. But we didn't have to do any of that. That very afternoon my father put his coat over his arm, and together with my mother, walked out of the Big Bargain House forever.

They had no regrets, except, momentarily, when my father remembered an item he'd left behind, such as his favourite pair of shears, that he could have asked to take with him. The store had served its purpose and its end came precisely at the right moment. The Big Bargian House filled an episode in our lives with satisfaction, fun, and yes, joy, and even with a feeling of the miraculous. And why not? Wasn't the Big Bargain House born without gestation and wasn't it terminated through the visitation of an angel? And, oh yes, by the way, the anonymous client turned out to be the Salvation Army.