A Tale of Two Delis.

If you grew up as I did during the heyday of New York Jewry, before the resurgence of modern anti-Jewish hate and violence, the epicenter of Jewish life was not a religious institution, a university, or even a well-catered shiva at Golda Rosenblatt's sprawling classic-6 on West End Avenue. It was the west side of Broadway between 74th and 81st Street.

That strip of energy had the great deli/grocery/fruit stand on its southern border at 74th Street, and the great emporium Zabar's at its northern border of 81st Street. (Of course, you could extend up to Murray's Sturgeon shop at 91st, or Barney Greengrass further east on 86th Street, but the true beacons were Fairway and Zabar's.) 

And what's happened to each store can be seen as instructive to not just the deli industry, but every industry in the world, including of course the decimated advertising industry. (Since decimate means killing just one out of ten, maybe what's happened in the ad industry needs a more accurate coinage or portmanteau--fiftypercentimate. In that the industry is about 50-percent smaller than it was. Or ninetyninepercentimate--in that just about one-percent of the work it produces is good and paid for by actual clients.)

Back to delis and delineation.

Fairway was cheaper. And had more stuff. And when bagels we're approaching the GML (gluten Maginot Line) that is when they neared a dollar an orbit, Fairway resolutely sold two for sixty-five cents. That was about one-third the price of what you'd pay for the same bagel at its birth-place H&H, up on 80th Street (usurped today by a Verizon store) or the glitzier Zabar's just a rugelach's throw further north. 

Fairway also had "bruised fruit Tuesday," a concession to the Social Security widows who kept their sprawling apartments after their husbands died (why do Jewish men die young? Because they marry Jewish women) and were living in fixed incomes. Fairway would sell bruised fruit--you could get a cantaloupe from which you'd just have to excise a niblick to make perfectly good--for nineteen cents. New York was a dangerous place in the 1970s, but nothing was more dangerous than getting between a sharp-elbowed fixed-income widow and a nineteen-cent cantaloupe. Don't even talk to me about nectarines.

Zabar's had a greater variety of fish, more deli meats, a cheese department more diverse than the United Nations and more characters per square inch than the Carnegie Deli during the filming of Woody Allen's "Broadway Danny Rose." If you couldn't find someone to kibbitz with at Zabar's you were, according to New York City Statute 1953A, codicil 6, subparagraph G, legally dead. What's more, no one missed you.

Here's what you can learn from all this.

Around 2007, Fairway sold to private equity. It expanded uptown, crosstown, downtown, to Queens, Brooklyn, Westchester and Connecticut. It was everywhere.

At first, it was great. 

Like agencies were with the infusion of holding company money. But before long the screws of PP (plunder profit) were tightened to the point where they were stripped. The number of people in sales was halved and halved again. The stores got dirty. You could find nothing, and find no help to direct you. Every shopping cart had a wobbly wheel. The place(s) went downhill faster than Lindsey Vonn.

Then, the PE-plunderers having strip-mined the operation and the neighborhoods they functioned in, then with the stores little better than a bad Acme, people started not going to Fairway. The stores, first the one in Pelham Bay abutting the Bronx, closed. Then the one in Douglaston, Queens. Then the one on the West Side Highway underneath the elevated train at 125th Street, then the one in Stamford, CT. 

They sucked, therefore they closed.

Too late I say, Holding Companies beware. Too late.

Zabar's stayed small. 
Independent.
Interested in their reason why.
Dedicated to their purpose. (Good lox.)

The store ran a tribute to Saul Zabar who died last week. Here's how Zabar's did business.

When I started GeorgeCo., I started it as the agency of "my way." My standards, my brain, my quirk, my skill, my beliefs, my passion.

I didn't want partners. Investors. I didn't want to gin it up to a certain size so I could sell. Most of all I didn't follow the shibboleth of every modren failed business. I didn't "scale."

One chair. 

One computer.
One passion.
One turn of a phrase.
Ten clients.

That's enough for me.

That's how Zabar's works.

Their "name" is on every slice of lox.

They stand for something.
Something more potent and important than the accumulation of capital.

That's all dumb and old-fashioned.
The PE guys who live in homes 21-times larger than mine laugh at me from their Bentley SUVs. As they change lanes without their turn signals and tailgate because laws don't apply to them.

I don't give a fuck.

I eat better.

(Below--from an article yesterday on Saul Zabar's shiva.

I'd die to have a shiva like that.)