Elgin resident Linda Frano still loves shopping for groceries in St. Charles where she previously lived for 30 years but knows her days of being a patron at a favorite local market there are numbered.
“I’ve been coming to the Blue Goose Market since they were located across the street and it’s been 30 years – easy,” Frano said as she visited the store on Valentine’s Day. “We get our meat and our vegetables here. They were always wonderful and there has always been great service in this store. You can’t beat it. It’s number one.”
Many St. Charles residents and others in the Fox Valley are lamenting the announcement in the past week that the Blue Goose Market at 300 S. Second St. in St. Charles will be closing in the near future, news that has been confirmed by owner and current St. Charles Ald. Paul Lencioni, 3rd Ward, who has said that the store “has given everything it has to give.”
Blue Goose Market has been a part of the community since 1928, Lencioni said, and has operated at four different locations around St. Charles over the years.
“The store is owned in trust and I’m the trustee and this has been my decision. At this juncture of the Blue Goose I am the sole decision-maker, and I spoke with some of my advisors,” Lencioni, 47, said. “I realized late last summer that some of the goals that I had for Blue Goose to get it in a place where it could be stable, I didn’t have confidence I could get it there so at that point, I didn’t want to get into a spot where I was doing business in a way that would be irresponsible.”
Lencioni said despite concerns that were building last summer, the final decision to close the store that was named after a co-op produce market in Chicago “was made in only the last month.”
“Instead of having just one level of distribution, my great-grandmother used to go down to a co-op produce market that was really high quality in Chicago,” he said. “She used to go there and she would say ‘Hey, I got the Blue Goose – I got the best! There is actually a legal document on old school onion paper that has an agreement with our store and the Blue Goose produce co-op that says within 40 miles you can use the name. That’s kind of how it happened.”
Lencioni cited factors ranging from “taking care of customers and maintaining the same level of quality” to putting “paychecks in jeopardy” as reasons for closing the store, which he hopes to sell to another grocer.
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“It’s such a complex business. For a long time, we’ve been in a very stable business environment and as small guy, you could pretty much operate OK but now everything is changing so fast,” he said. “We haven’t seen inflation like this in 40 years and it requires a lot of high-level expertise in pricing, more technology, more recruiting. In 24 months we’ve had over 40% increases in minimum wages and supermarkets make it on entry-level workers.”
Lencioni says he is the fourth person to run the Blue Goose, a store that currently boasts somewhere around 100 employees who will have to look elsewhere for employment.
Heather Enders of Geneva said she has been an employee of the store for three years, serving as a personal shopper.
“Senior citizens of the town call in and I go and get their items,” Enders explained. “This is a job that didn’t exist 10 years ago. A neighborhood grocery store is very important, especially in a job like mine. I shop for people in all the surrounding towns and the only way (to get groceries) is by calling in and having me handwrite the order for them. Our delivery guys bring it to their homes and help them carry it in, and these people don’t know what they’re going to do. The big store won’t do that personal kind of thing.”
Enders acknowledged that stores like Amazon Fresh Stores do provide grocery shopping services but that many seniors “can’t use computers and order things online.”
“We don’t know what they (the seniors) are going to do and that’s what a neighborhood grocery store provides,” she said. “I feel like I’m doing something for these people in that they might be talking to nobody all week but with their personal shopper and the driver.”
Kyle Krahenvuhl, 31, of Batavia, said he has worked as a butcher at Blue Goose for eight years and has actually hung around at the store “since I was a kid.”
“My dad was the manager and worked here for a long time and I’ve been hanging around and grew up with all the guys. They had the same crew here for 20-something years,” he said. “People are sad and so many have been shopping here for 40 or 50 years and there’s a lot of emotional attachment. Hopefully we can get another store in here that supports the community like we have.”
David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.