Small Albany grocery store triples business amid pandemic. Is it enough to survive a recession?
ALBANY, Ind. — In Tom Bellar’s 46-year career at Minars Market, an independent grocery store in Albany, he’s learned that having too many emptied meat trays is usually an omen for looming national disaster.
A former co-owner of the store and current, self-described “meat man” (officially, manager of the meat department), Bellar said, in his nearly five decades, he’s seen the counter completely empty only twice.
Bellar, who considers the production and display of the store’s signature product an art form, first lamented the sight of bare trays covering the typically well-stocked display during a catastrophic ice storm that tore through the area in 2005. The storm knocked out power in Albany, a town of around 2,000 residents, forcing Minars employees to dump hundreds of pounds of beef, poultry and fish into the garbage per FDA regulations.
The second time in his career he saw the meat counter empty was just a few weeks ago.
Throughout April, coronavirus outbreaks at dozens of meat processing facilities around the U.S. threatened to sever the nation's food supply chain. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on April 28, declaring meat processing plants “critical infrastructure” with the aim of preventing shortages.
But Minars Market, which has been known for its meat department since it first opened in the 1940s, had yet to be affected by factory closures. But that had no bearing on the waves of customers who poured into the store that week, overwhelming the three full-time employees and dozen or so part-timers.
“They just went wild,” Bellar said. “It was completely unreal, totally media-driven … there was no shortage but by the afternoons they made a shortage, they cleared us out, we had every tray emptied, stacked and washed.”
The current owner of Minars Market, Johnny Singh, happened to be in New York on a business trip when fear of meat scarcity first compelled hundreds of customers to the small grocery store.
“It’s been unbelievable,” Singh said. “Just the other day a woman came in and bought 200 pounds of meat … I have no idea what for.”
Since the first stay-at-home order was issued by Gov. Eric Holcomb in March, the store has had three times as many customers as it typically serves, Singh said. Each week, and sometimes each day has brought wildly fluctuating demand for specific products, he added.
“We had trouble for weeks keeping toilet paper stocked, then it was hand sanitizer, then cleaners, gloves, masks, canned stuff, bread, meat,” Singh said. “We usually have our regular customers but we’ve been seeing lots of people that have traveled from out of town.”
'Panic-buying just makes things more difficult'
With the coronavirus creating spikes in demand, many assume retailers like Minars Market or manufacturers, like those that make toilet paper and cleaning products for instance, would ultimately benefit from the pandemic.
But author, researcher and professor of marketing at Rice University and the writer of the Psychology Today blog “The Science Behind Behavior" Uptal Dholakia said Minars Market, and independent retailers like it, are riding a wave of panic-buying that is a poor predictor of whether a business will struggle down the road.
“By and large, panic-buying just makes things more difficult for everyone concerned,” Dholakia said. “All it does for a company is basically take demand for a product from a future time period and bring it the current moment.”
Dholakia said while panic-buying might result in higher earnings for a business in the month it occurs, in most cases the later lack of demand cancels out any benefits. Additionally, he said panic-buying often compromises the economic security of the consumers businesses rely on.
“Companies prefer stability and predictability,” Dholakia said “The cost of that short-term boost in business is too high for owners who then have to figure out how much to produce or restock down the road in order to avoid losing money.”
Dholakia said that the panic-buying he’s seen during this pandemic has had a unique severity when compared to other instances of fear-based shopping.
“All of the panic-buying during a natural disaster, like a hurricane, tends to be highly localized and have a clear endpoint,” Dholakia said. “This is occurring on a global scale and most have no idea what’s going to happen a month from now.”
Dholakia points to unbalanced media coverage of people hoarding supplies and a lack of trust in public officials as other compounding factors that fuel panic.
“As a practical matter, most of us want to have food to eat, and someone you don’t trust telling you there’s going to be enough just isn’t a powerful enough argument to change behavior,” Dholakia said.
'We’ve been going non-stop'
Singh said he hopes some of the new customers who have visited Minars Market since the start of the pandemic will become regulars. He said while the boost in sales has been helpful, he and his staff, two of whom were quarantined at home for two weeks with coronavirus symptoms, are ready for a break.
“We’ve been going non-stop,” Singh said. “At a point you just want things to go back to normal and you’re thinking ‘when will this craziness end?’”
According to John Talbott, a senior lecturer at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business and the associate director of the Center for Education and Research in Retailing, Minars Market is representative of a miniscule contingent of small businesses in the state that have managed to navigate the pandemic to this point relatively unscathed.
“Absolutely, without question small businesses are in the most danger right now,” Talbott said. “Large companies, on the other hand, are going to hold up pretty well … it’s strange to see the disconnect between the stock market making a record recovery and the reality facing small businesses that don’t have the capital to bridge the gap between now and the end of this crisis.”
Talbott said that outliers like small-town, independent grocery stores might have more resilience amid the coronavirus in the short term because, in addition to being a target of panic shoppers, they have fewer concerns about keeping customers six feet apart.
Bellar and Singh credit geography, produce and fresh meat for the store’s durability. To that point, the only nearby competition is Albany’s Dollar General which is positioned just across the street.
“Dollar General just hasn’t been that much trouble for us,” Bellar said. “The trouble has been that once we run out of something we have to stop and start over the next morning … we don’t have little elves that come in and restock everything for us when customers ask for it.”
Singh said the near constant influx of new visitors to Minars Market, especially after stimulus checks were issued, is allowing the store to succeed without additional government aid.
A long road for small businesses
According to Talbott, in the current economic landscape, the simple act of operating normally makes a small business like Minars an outlier. He said the vast majority of companies are still reeling from the chaos and financial disruption of quarantine.
“I don’t think we should expect to see small businesses come back 100 percent any time in the near future,” Talbott said. “We have a long road ahead of us before we truly reach a ‘new normal’.”
Talbott said, in the wake of closures and diminished GDP, there’s likely an economic aftershock coming that, like the pandemic, will be felt more acutely by small businesses in the coming months. He said how we handle an economic downturn will have a major impact on the future of the state.
“If you look back at the Great Recession, small businesses are affected disproportionately,” Talbott said. “The longer that this thing is around the more dangerous it is for small businesses. Their survival is going to come down to the federal government’s willingness to supply additional rounds of loans.”
Stacey Poynter, director of the Indiana branch of the Small Business Administration, said he and his team have facilitated struggling Indiana small businesses in the acquisition of more than 68,000 Paycheck Protection Program loans through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act.
Through PPP, businesses can receive an amount up to $10 million in loans based on their eight-week payroll costs. Those loans are forgivable if 75 percent of the funding covers employee paychecks.
Poynter said the success of the first two rounds of federal funding has been critical in sustaining businesses that otherwise would have closed permanently. During this crisis, he said, recovery is dependent on financial support for small businesses that employ 46 percent of Indiana workers and comprise 99 percent of the total number of existing companies in the state.
“Small businesses are absolutely the lifeblood of this economy,” Poynter said. “This is not a partisan issue; … the fact that Congress has already approved two rounds of these loans indicates they understand how important this is.”
And yet, stipulations that come with PPP loans have many business owners that require government support during the pandemic wondering if they have traded one economic burden for another.
On May 8, the SBA’s Office of the Inspector General issued a report indicating tens of thousands of small businesses will be unable to reach the 75-percent payroll requirement of the loans and would, therefore, void the possibility of having those loans forgiven. The report notes that payroll, for most small businesses, is not their primary hardship.
Poynter said if a business can’t reach the 75-percent threshold they would be required to pay back the loan within two years, a feat many small businesses, with low profit margins, recovering from an extended closure and facing a recession would find daunting.
Poynter could not indicate if changes would be made to the loan to prevent further hardship but issued a response with regard to the inspector general’s report.
“The SBA is reviewing the report and its recommendations as we work to administer millions of Paycheck Protection Program loans totaling billions of dollars to help keep paychecks going to hardworking Americans,” Poynter said.
'Just doing our best to make sure people have what they need for dinner'
A survey conducted by the Main Street America network, a research collaboration between 1,600 commercial districts, determined 7.5 million, or two-thirds of small business owners are facing permanent closure within the next few months.
As some retailers, restaurants and salons cautiously reopen, a feeling of ambiguity — both with regard to the virus and the economy — predominates the minds of many business owners. And, despite spending most of the governor’s stay-at-home order working overtime to keep up with a multitude of new customers, that feeling of uncertainty is no different for Singh and Bellar who are relying on short-term gain, not government assistance, to survive any impending recession.
“We’re just taking it day by day; that’s all we can do now,” Bellar said. “Just doing our best to make sure people have what they need for dinner.”
Weeks after fear-driven customers depleted the Minars Market meat counter, the store is just now experiencing a slight strain from factory closures.
“There’s a few things we are having to search a little harder for now and prices are a lot higher,” Bellar said. “You’d think with schools and restaurants closed there’d be oodles and gobs of product for grocery stores to have.”
Bellar spent Tuesday morning preparing his prized display with a few substitute products.
“It would take something a lot worse than this virus for us to really worry about the future,” Bellar said.
Jordan Kartholl is a photojournalist at The Star Press. Contact him at 317-217-8681, jkartholl@muncie.gannett.com or on Instagram at @thestarpress.