Stew Leonard Sr. Dies at 93; Founded ‘Disneyland of Dairy Stores’

Stew Leonard Sr., a folkloric retailer who expanded his namesake shops into merchandising meccas replete with petting zoos and mechanical singing cattle, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 93.

The trigger was issues of pneumonia, his son Stewart Jr. stated.

Mr. Leonard opened his unique retailer in Norwalk, Conn., in 1969 as a vacation spot that promised contemporary milk as a result of it was constructed round a bottling plant. “You’d have to own a cow to get it sooner,” his commercials proclaimed.

Bryan Miller described it in The New York Times because the “Disneyland of Dairy Stores”; “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” known as it the “World’s Largest Dairy Store”; and it earned a spot within the Guinness World Records for having the best greenback gross sales per sq. foot of promoting area.

In 2015, Business Insider praised Kroger’s buyer loyalty program and Wegmans’s walk-in beer locker, nevertheless it concluded that anybody who had ever set foot in Stew Leonard’s “knows it is miles above the rest.”

The journal listed 13 causes Stew Leonard’s was “truly America’s best grocery store.” The first was its customer support coverage: “Rule 1: The customer is always right. Rule 2: If the customer is ever wrong, reread Rule 1.”

More than 50 years after the primary retailer opened, Stew Leonard’s has expanded to embody seven areas incomes $600 million yearly, and it stays family-owned and operated with an enormously loyal buyer base.

Mr. Leonard turned Frank Perdue’s greatest wholesale hen purchaser. He organized with a distributor buddy to bottle Paul Newman’s salad dressing. The shops’ chief criterion for employment was an exuberant smile. To preserve costs low, the shops have stocked solely about 2,000 objects — grocery fundamentals — about 3 % of what chain shops promote.

In 1986, he was offered with a Presidential Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence from Ronald Reagan.

Mr. Leonard retired round 1990, however remained chairman emeritus of the corporate’s board. Three years later, he was sentenced to jail after pleading responsible to tax fraud for skimming greater than $17 million in gross sales from the Norwalk retailer; on the time, it was the nation’s largest computer-driven tax evasion case on file.

Many of his devoted patrons who have been interviewed afterward appeared extra saddened or dissatisfied then indignant. At his sentencing, Mr. Leonard, leaning on a metallic cane after hip surgical procedure, stated, sobbing: “I’ve hurt my family. I’ve hurt my children. I’ve hurt my customers.”

In a cellphone interview on Thursday, Stewart Jr. described the fraud as “more of a small business entrepreneurial mistake.” He stated that whereas his father was serving 44 months of a 52-month sentence in a federal jail in McKean, Pa., he lectured retailers about his errors in close by Bradford. Since then he had mentored younger entrepreneurs, warning them towards “the trap you can fall into of not putting everything into the cash register,” his son stated.

Also in 1993, the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection accused the Norwalk retailer of short-weighting clients on objects like hen, walnuts and tomatoes. Mr. Leonard stated the burden discrepancies have been minuscule and have been corrected.

Stewart John Leonard was born on Dec. 1, 1929, in Norwalk to Charles Leonard, a hatter who based Clover Farms Dairy within the early Twenties, and Anna (Stewart) Leonard, a homemaker.

“My dream ever since I was a little boy was to be a milkman,” he advised The Times. He graduated from Norwalk High School, however as he was incomes a level from the Ratcliffe Hicks School of Agriculture on the University of Connecticut in Storrs in 1951, his father died, and he and his brother inherited the enterprise.

In 1967, the state condemned the household dairy for a freeway, leaving him shattered.

“Milk was all I knew,” he stated.

In “Stew Leonard: My Story” (2009, with Scotty Reiss), he wrote that he had requested clients on his milk route for recommendation on what to do. They advised that he open a retail retailer and, with no intermediary, proceed to promote his dairy merchandise on the similar low costs. He quickly purchased pasture land in Norwalk from a widow who had been a buyer of his father’s; she had agreed to promote provided that the youthful Mr. Leonard agreed to maintain her sheep and chickens, too.

They turned a part of the petting zoo, which joined the mechanical cows and geese and varied costumed characters who’ve welcomed clients as they move by way of the shop alongside a single broad snaking aisle flanked by free choices from tempting pattern cubicles.

As Tom Peters and Nancy Austin wrote in “A Passion for Excellence: The Leadership Difference” (1985), “Don’t tell Stew or his customers that food shopping is a bore!”

The retailer was initially known as Clover Farms Dairy, however after a competitor opened a facsimile 20 miles away, and after Mr. Leonard found that his father had by no means trademarked the title, he branded the shop as Stew Leonard’s.

The firm now has seven shops, in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.

It is run by Stewart Jr. alongside along with his siblings, Beth Leonard Hollis and Jill Leonard Tavello. In addition to them, Mr. Leonard is survived by his spouse, Marianne (Guthman) Leonard; one other son, Tom; 13 grandchildren, 5 of whom work for the corporate; and 11 great-grandchildren.

In retailing, Mr. Leonard stated, the “wow factor” sells, however minding the shop is what retains the enterprise going and rising.

“You’d have to be able to stay on top of it,” he advised The Times in 1983, invoking an earthy aphorism from his dairy days. “I still believe that a farmer’s shadow is the best fertilizer.”