I'd never made the journey, all of 30 minutes from my home by car, to a street I'd heard about for years.
For anyone living near New York City, Arthur Avenue, in the Bronx, is legendary for its Italian restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries, fishmongers, butchers and shops selling every possible iteration of coffee maker and shape and size of pasta.
One even offered an enormous pizza oven for sale on the sidewalk.
A friend, who shops there monthly, made a spontaneous offer and, on a sunny September Tuesday morning, we went.
Our first stop, of course, was Egidio's Pastry Shop, its cases filled with cannoli, butter cookies, biscotti and my favorite, sfogliatella.
We noticed another woman there, elegantly dressed, and struck up a conversation -- discovering that all three of us had come down from Westchester, an affluent county with a few similar food shops, but mostly dominated by enormous, soul-less grocery store chains.
We craved warmth, charm, fun -- in industry jargon, a great "customer experience" -- and were not disappointed. Arthur Avenue provides for a great customer experience in seven crucial ways:
- The area is reasonably small and well-defined. Metered street parking made it easy to load ourselves down with shopping bags, drop them off, and load up again. Walking in and out of stores, European-style, is a lot more enjoyable than pushing another grocery cart across another anonymous, multinational-owned, hangar-sized grocery store. With 47 million Americans suffering arthritis -- and I'm using a cane these days for an injured knee -- having to endlessly crisscross a mega-store for the most basic items, certainly if your mobility is impaired, is exhausting and annoying.
- Variety! From 20 varieties of olive oil to octopus imported from Italy, to fresh sea urchins to hand-rolled cigars, it's hard not to find something here you to delight you and your family.
Photo: Caitlin Kelly
- Price. The fishmonger we visited -- who buys his fish from the very same market as our local privately-owned grocery store in my suburban town -- was charging almost one-third the price for the same fish. Shoppers notice prices! I'd rather drive 30 minutes to buy from someone who's pricing more fairly; $30 a pound is far too rich for most people's blood. I noticed several major brands, including cookies, jam and pasta, priced significantly lower than in my town.
- The stores are small and family-run. No corporate behemoth can replicate the personal pleasure of chatting with someone standing in front of you, pulling enormous sheets of fresh pasta through a machine, or joking across the bakery counter, a trio of firefighters ahead of you in line.
- They're filled with history. These stores don't pretend to be "authentic" or "artisanal", jammed with antique objects bought from a supplier's warehouse. They're filled with real people happily doing the work they've been doing for decades, generations -- even centuries.
- Great meals on-site. There are several restaurants in the neighborhood. We ate a sandwich -- prosciutto on focaccica, of course -- siting at shared wooden tables, watching our fellow diners enjoying a bottle of rose and a plate filled with appetizers. One fishmonger has a sidewalk raw bar; what a great break, a few fresh oysters!
- Conversation. For some people, food shopping is just a tedious chore, best done quickly and efficiently, using an app and a delivery truck. But my friend and I loved conversing with the experts, the people from whom we're buying -- finding out the season for sea urchins, being offered a discount rate on a left-over hunk of prosciutto, asking for a specific width of fresh pasta, cut to order. We stood and watched two men pulling leaves of tobacco from an enormous sack, cutting them deftly with small knives and rolling them into cigars. The tobacco, they said in Spanish, comes from Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.
What a pleasure to actually speak with someone making something by hand, and skilfully, and enjoying the process, right in front of us.
At a shared lunch table, we quickly fell into a lively conversation with three strangers. That never happens in a grocery store, even those with in-store seating.
"Customer experience" and "engagement" are words I hear constantly from professional retailers, as frustrated by their inability to coax it out of their low-paid, high-turnover sales staff as from fed-up shoppers.
Head to the Bronx -- and see it firsthand in action.
