Cavorting Cows and Coddled Customers Make Dairy Store a Best Seller

NORWALK, Conn. — The crowd is five deep at the petting zoo, and just parking the car requires patience, skill and help from a guy in a sheriff’s uniform directing bumper-to-bumper traffic around a huge lot.

Inside, robot dogs sing mournfully of lost love and Rich Milk, spokescarton for “The Farm Fresh Five,” an animated quintet of dairy products, plays to a packed house. College kids in cow costumes cavort between shows and helium balloons float through popcorn-scented air.

It’s not a theme park, it’s “The Disneyland of Dairy Stores,” as Rich Milk puts it. Should that description stay with you, owner Stew Leonard won’t mind a bit. “Disney’s my hero,” he says.

Inventory of 700 Items

“The Different Dairy” is another catch-phrase, and proof of that can be found on the bottom line: Stew Leonard’s Dairy Store sells $100 million worth of food a year, more per square foot than any other grocery. This despite an inventory of 700 items--a typical supermarket carries 24,000--and the presence of 93 other markets within 15 miles of that clogged parking lot.

Each year, 500,000 pounds of butter, 10 million quarts of milk and 500 tons of salads pass his computerized checkouts; in a typical week, 100,000 pounds of his buddy Frank Perdue’s chickens fly off the shelves.

Leonard focuses on customers; 100,000 troop through every week, and his mission is to see that they walk out happy. To do that, he gives them what they want the way they want it. Choosy about berries? He’ll put them out loose. Prefer fish on ice instead of on Styrofoam? He’ll build a fish bar.

The responsiveness works both ways. Stew’s customers stuff his suggestion box with more than 100 comments a day, and some come in on Sundays to put in their 2 cents in person, at monthly meetings with management.

A vacationing shopper homesick for the store sent a snapshot of herself holding a Stew Leonard’s bag in Moscow’s Red Square. Stew tacked it up. He has since received 7,000 pictures of customers and bags at such spots as the Taj Mahal and the Great Sphinx. His favorite: an underwater shot of skin divers holding their bag beneath the Bermuda Triangle.

A Carnival for Children

The store is “a minicarnival” to customer Doris Brown of Norwalk, who says taking her two preschoolers “can take the edge off a very bad day.”

The large sales and loyal following, combined with a cheerleading management style that stresses teamwork, advancement and fun, have made Stew Leonard a small-business superstar. He is in a dozen books (Tom Peters’ “A Passion for Excellence” mentions him 22 times) and numerous marketing and management training videos. He is the star of a Dale Carnegie ad campaign. And recently, he was one of 11 business people honored by President Reagan.

Leonard’s advice to the next generation of corporate Americans, already dissecting his methods in business schools across the land: “Don’t go into business to get rich. Do it to enrich people. It will come back to you.

“Big business always makes it sound so complicated,” he added. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You just have to care.”

Like friend and neighbor Paul Newman, whose salad dressing he helped launch, Leonard has now tasted fame. Unlike the actor, who “puts his coat over his head when he goes out to dinner,” Leonard is eating it up.

‘Dream of Every Entrepreneur’

“I can hardly believe it,” said the silver-haired, bespectacled grocer. “To be the hero in your own thing, that’s the dream of every entrepreneur.”

The philosophy that got him here is literally chiseled in stone outside the dairy, a rambling gray building that resembles a barn. A 3-ton hunk of granite at the entrance reads:

“Rule 1--The customer is always right.

“Rule 2--If the customer is ever wrong, re-read Rule 1.”

Skeptics need only hang around the customer service counter where cheerful employees soothe the disgruntled. Recently, they included a woman complaining of stale coffee beans. When had she bought them? “Two years ago.” She got a refund, as did the shopper who returned her Christmas tree in March.

It had dried out.

Refund for Unsold Item

Not long ago, a woman asked for--and got--a refund for 20 pounds of shrimp. Later, a worker discovered she’d never paid for them.

“My hardest job is not to catch her, but to keep those people on the customer service desk from developing a bad attitude,” said Leonard, who thinks “999 people out of 1,000 are honest.”

“I know I’ve got to get cheated once in a while, but don’t tell me about it. Don’t shade my thinking.”

“I grew up in Norwalk, so I feel like it’s part of me,” said employee Richard Lung, who works on “Stew’s News,” a sort of “People” magazine for employees that a business magazine calls “the ultimate company newsletter.”

“I had no art degree, but four years ago, he gave me a chance. I’m glad--it’s a special place to work.” Among other fringe benefits, Lung says, his employer has paid for art classes and seminars at Bridgeport University.

Wanted to Be Milkman

Some kids dream of becoming movie stars. Stew Leonard dreamed of being a milkman. The youngest of seven, he’d get up at 4 a.m. for the thrill of riding along on his father’s Norwalk milk route.

His father died four months after Stew graduated from college. He took over the business, got married, had four children. Then, in 1968, the state built a highway through his dairy.

Leonard gambled that he could get customers to make a special trip for milk by building a store around a dairy.

He was 38 years old. He remortgaged his house, dipped into his children’s college fund and borrowed $482,500 from the Small Business Administration, a record amount at the time.

From the beginning, the store was different. Instead of many narrow aisles, Leonard built one wide labyrinth that brings customers face-to-face with the entire inventory. In 1969, the year he opened, it consisted of seven items.

Salads and Hot Entrees

Since then, he’s added on 27 times. The store now features a $1-million kitchen that turns out 200 salads and hot entrees daily, a barbecue department and a seasonal garden shop that pops up with the crocuses.

The milk-processing plant, which pasteurizes and packages 5 million half-gallons of milk and 1.5 million half-gallons of orange juice annually, is glassed-in so customers can watch cartons whiz by at 150 per minute.

Stew’s children have all joined the business.

A firm believer in nepotism, Leonard has 22 relatives on his payroll. Half his 600 employees have relatives here too. “It’s very good for the culture of a company,” he said.

In spare moments, Leonard works on his design for the new and improved Stew Leonard’s, set to open in Danbury in two years. He says it will be similar to Norwalk, only bigger.

And this time, the cows will be real.