Family-run markets are bread, butter of older city
The talk in San Francisco is about big business — high-tech, office towers rising on the skyline, whole new neighborhoods springing up, old neighborhoods transformed.
Underneath all that is another, an older city, with hundreds of small corner stores, mom-andpop operations, usually run by immigrants who believe in hard work and long hours.
We rode along the other day with Rod Stoller in his big, old, white refrigerated Chevy truck, delivering ice cream to mom-and-pop stores in the Bayview, the Western Addition, the Haight and the Inner Richmond.
Stoller, who is 74, is the oldest of three brothers who together run a small wholesale ice cream firm. His route and his customers are the heart of small-time San Francisco.
The typical corner store is piled high with merchandise: Groceries, vegetables, canned goods, beer, wine, liquor, cigarettes, milk, snacks, ice cream, lottery tickets. All the necessities of life. They are open from morning to midnight, seven days a week. A married couple usually run the business, but the family is expected to work. The clerks are the children and grandchildren. It is not an easy job. “I came here on May 8, 1977, and from that date I have been working every day,” said Ribhi Mohammad, who owns O’Looney’s Market at Haight and Steiner streets. O’Looney could have been the name of a former owner, but Mohammad, like many of the corner grocers, is Palestinian.
He has seen the Lower Haight change from a high-crime neighborhood to one lined with restaurants and boutiques. His market now stocks 37 different brands of beer, and plenty of ice cream.
The ice cream case is up front near the cashier’s counter and is full of bewildering variety: pints, quarts, ice cream on a stick, ice cream sandwiches, Drumsticks, flavored ice, ice cream cones. There’s even a brand called Choco Taco, which looks like a taco and tastes like ice cream.
One of Stoller’s biggest sellers is It’s-It, an ice cream sandwich invented at the old Playland-at-the-Beach in 1928 and now sold nationwide. “A San Francisco original,” he said, “like Rice-a-Roni.”
Stoller carries 37 kinds of ice cream. Among them is Halo, a low-calorie brand, and Three Twins, an organic ice cream made in Petaluma. “It’s all good,” he said. “I eat it myself and have the cholesterol to prove it.”
In the world of family businesses, Stoller is like family in San Francisco. He’s welcome whenever he comes in, even to collect the bill.
“Everybody knows Rod,” Mohammad said. “I knew his father, too. His father was the best man in the world.”
Rod’s father, Bill, brought the family from North Dakota, where he ran a bar. The elder Stoller got into ice cream wholesaling in the 1950s, and Rod joined up right after high school. “I thought I’d help out for a year,” he said.
His two brothers, Wayne and Keith, make up the rest of the firm. “I like to say we have over 150 years in the business,” Rod Stoller said.
He is well aware of the problems of very small businesses in a sometimes rough big city. “I feel for those mom-and-pop stores,” he said. “They are out there all the time. You never know who’s coming in that door.”
Many of the small stores are in poor neighborhoods in the toughest parts of the city. One day, Stoller said, he was on his rounds in the Bayview and was just pulling up to a corner grocery when a gunfight broke out right in front of his truck.
“Hey, Rod!” the grocer yelled. “Come back in an hour. They’ll be done by then.”
The biggest store on Stoller’s route is Arguello Market on Arguello Boulevard near Golden Gate Park in the Inner Richmond.
Arguello Market is a small supermarket, “a rare independent market,” said owner Sal Qaqundah. This market has a deli attached and a sign says it is “the home of the world-famous turkey sandwich,” featured on the Travel Channel. A big deal for a small business.
More typical is the H & K Market at Jennings and Fitzgerald streets out in the Bayview. Here is a market jammed with stuff. The nearest supermarket is far away.
John Freij, the owner, knows all the regulars by name. It’s like a small town. “I have never had any trouble here,” he said.
Freij is 78 now; his wife died two years ago. There is a little shrine to his wife in the front of the store. The couple’s son, Sam, also works there.
“I have been here every day for 40 years,” Freij said. In the world of small business, these are the San Francisco values.
“I feel for those mom-and-pop stores. They are out there all the time. You never know who’s coming in that door.” Rod Stoller, ice cream deliveryman