Stewart's Shops
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Stewart's Shops | |
 |
|
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1945 |
| Headquarters | Saratoga Springs, New York |
| Key people | Chairman: William Dake President: Gary Dake Treasurer: David Farr |
| Industry | Retail (convenience stores) |
| Revenue | $1 billion |
| Net income | $30 million |
| Employees | 3,800 |
| Website | http://www.stewartsshops.com/ |
Stewart's Shops is a U.S. chain of convenience stores located primarily in eastern Upstate New York and southwestern Vermont.
Headquartered in Saratoga Springs, the company is something of a modest regional institution, particularly in the Capital District. Within New York, its stores and their distinctive maroon signs can be found as far north as the Canadian border towns, as far west as Oswego and as far south as Washingtonville at the northern fringe of the New York metropolitan area. Its Vermont outlets can be found in Rutland and Bennington counties.
Known for branded ice cream, milk, coffee and other drinks, the stores often include gasoline pumps. In addition, most also feature a small dining area, rather unusual for U.S. stores of this type, which generally do not have any public seating.
[edit] History
Stewart's has always been a business of the Dake family, which traces the chain's origins to Percy and Charles V. Dake making Dake's Delicious Ice Cream beginning in 1921 at the family farm in Greenfield.
Fourteen years later, the brothers started Saratoga Dairy in an old barn in Saratoga Springs. It was a serendipitous move, since New York began requiring that year that all milk be pasteurized. Without the local plant available, many local dairy farmers would have had to go out of business, and they were grateful vendors.
In 1938 they expanded into the city's old water works, and then went into making cheese, powdered whey and casein two years afterward, following yet another new property purchase, this time in Greenfield. That and the milk this plant produced were sold all over the Northeast, as far south as Maryland.
As the war ended, the brothers bought an ice cream production facility in Ballston Spa from Donald Stewart. Charles S. Dake, newly discharged from the military and looking for something to do, decided to start selling Stewart's Ice Cream to the public fresh off the line. This is considered to be the first Stewart's Shop.
Two others quickly followed, in Saratoga Springs and South Glens Falls. They were popular since ice cream and other sweet foods had been tightly rationed during the war. In 1948 the company introduced the folding paper ice cream carton so customers could bring home fresh ice cream more cheaply. The more notable innovation of the year, however, came from the younger Charles Dake's wife Phyllis, who suggested allowing people to make their own sundaes from a choice of toppings, a practice which continues today and has been widely imitated.
Saratoga Dairy and Stewart's Ice Cream were formally incorporated with the state in 1950, and ice cream production was moved back to the Greenfield facility, which could handle the increased demand. By 1955 there were over 50 Stewart's Shops.
1957 saw a regulatory battle between the companies and the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the right to sell the company's own milk in its own stores. It was resolved in Stewart's favor, and as a result of this vertical integration, retail milk prices in the stores dropped by 25%.
The younger Dake took over the company from his uncle in 1959 and the following year brought his brother William in. The holder of a graduate degree in engineering from Cornell University, William was able to solve some production problems at the dairy, and as a result it began running at a profit. Over the course of the 1960s, the new Dake brothers turned the company into one of the East's largest private dairies.
Charles died of cancer in 1978, leaving William to carry on the business for six years until his son Gary could join the company. A decade later, the company built a new dairy facility and bought the Bonfare chain, adding 40 stores at a single stroke. In the late 1990s, it began aggressively expanding out of its base in the Saratoga area, pushing south into the mid-Hudson Valley for the first time. There are currently (as of 2006) 322 shops.
William retired to become chairman of the board in 2003, and Gary became president of the company.
[edit] 2006 newspaper pricing controversy
In the Mid-Hudson Valley area starting in August of 2006, Stewart's started a highly-criticized practice of charging as much as 40ยข over the cover price on some of the newspapers they sell. The chain blames price increases by their distributors. However, some of the higher-priced newspapers are local, delivered directly to stores by the publisher.[citation needed]
