Flower shop blooms despite change all around
BARBERTON — Flower arrangements for funerals were in the cooler, ready to go out in the morning. Orders for corsages and boutonnieres for students going to the local high school dance were tacked to a shelf.
For nearly 100 years, Caine’s Flowers in Barberton has helped mark life’s milestones.
The same family has owned and operated the shop since 1921, seeing it through the Great Depression, the Great Recession and changing consumer tastes, as well as competition from grocery and big-box stores and online retailers.
Same family, same location, in a narrow storefront in downtown Barberton, surviving for five generations. And every year, Valtentine’s Day brings pressure, like last week.
“Everybody gets a little tense, but we’re all friends in the end,” said Ariel Fuller, 33, the fifth generation to work at the shop.
How does the family handle the stress?
“Oh, there’s throwing of scissors,” her father, Caine Pieffer, 60, said wryly.
Pieffer was named after his grandfather, Robert J. Caine, one of the shop’s founders. Pieffer has worked at the shop steadily since 1979. His sister, Bunde Roebuck, joined him in 1982. The brother and sister have overseen shop operations since 2000.
He points to an antique wicker funeral basket, as if to provide evidence of the shop’s longevity.
“This is from President Warren Harding’s funeral,” he said, explaining that in 1923, the shop, along with others in Ohio, sent flowers via train to Marion for Harding’s funeral rites.
Caine’s was founded by Pieffer’s grandparents, Robert and Camilla G. Caine, and Robert’s mother, Alice.
“I think she — Alice — had the dough,” Pieffer said.
Barberton, a workingclass town founded by industrialist O.C. Barber, was in its heyday. It had grown from a population of about 4,000 in 1900 to nearly 19,000 in 1920.
Founders Robert and Camilla G. Caine had one child, Camilla R. Caine. She married William Pieffer, and they took over running the business in 1968, having worked there since the early 1950s.
Caine Pieffer almost didn’t take up the family business.
After graduating from Barberton High School, Pieffer went to seminary for a few years before deciding the priesthood wasn’t for him.
He left his studies and started working at the store.
“I guess it’s just that I’d been here all my life,” Pieffer said.
His sister, Bunde Roebuck, chimed in: “I guess we’re all here because we just kind of grew up here, grew into it.”
Last fall, Ariel Fuller, Pieffer’s daughter, returned to regularly working at the shop, after primarily being a stay-at-home mom for several years.
A wood-paneled flower cooler, with a window that allows customers to peer in, dates to the store’s beginning.
There was an outhouse behind the shop until 1972. It was torn down to make way for an addition that houses the work area.
The shop has survived while many in the industry have closed.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of U.S. florist shops has dropped from 21,135 in 2005 to 13,765 in 2014, the latest year for which numbers are available.
Barberton’s downtown boasts one other flower shop, Flowers Galore & More. Chris Silva opened it up in 2010, figuring he could generate business through his Silva-Hostetler Funeral Home in Barberton.
The family members said there have been lean times, such as during the Great Recession.
Loyal customers — “parents and now their kids” — have sustained Caine’s, Roebuck said.