Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: You're listening to the Weighing in podcast, the show that brings you inside the Daily Gazette's featured news column.
And now here's your host writer of the Weighing in column, Andrew Waite.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: I own a Stewart's beanie and I wear it often. I'm telling you about my winter hat only because I want to tell you that like any good son of upstate New York, I'm a bit of a Stewart's evangelist. And I even wrote a column about my love for Stewart's last holiday season.
But this week, frankly, the entire Stewart's brand got called into question for me.
As you've probably heard, the chain of more than 350 convenience stores in New York and Vermont announced that this week that it was closing an Albany location, a legacy non gas store at the corner of Manning Boulevard and Central Avenue in Albany.
And for the first time in the company's history, the closure wasn't about money, but it was instead about crime. And the company issued a press release citing an uptick of theft and robberies and threats of violence that made the store too dangerous to operate, according to the company.
And I think a lot of people took this news and said, wow, if even Stewart's a staple of the community, can't stomach it, things must be pretty bad.
To be honest, I was set to write a column that said as much.
But then the more reporting I did and the more reporting I read from others, I just started to think differently about how to interpret this closure.
No one is doubting that the Beverwick and West End neighborhoods have their problems. I live not all that far from there. Down Manning Boulevard, we skate at Swinburne Park. In winters, there's crime, homelessness, drug use. It's a serious problem.
But if Stewart's were truly interested in investing in communities as their brand purports, they could have stayed. They could have continued to be a community partner.
As Stuart's president Gary Dake told me, the store that closed Thursday was actually a profitable store, but they closed it because they said crime was getting worse and protecting emploYees. Absolutely important. And on the one hand, it's admirable that Stewards would put employee safety over profit, but they were saying that crime was getting worse when in actuality, police data show that there have been no reports of violent incidents this year, compared to four reports of violent incidents and three robberies last year. So people in the neighborhood kind of felt like things.
There's still a long way to go, but there's no reason to abandon ship here. And Albany Common Council's 11th Ward District representative, Alfredo Ballarin. He said they had a conversation. He, along with people in the mayor's office, the Albany Police Department and Stewards officials, they had a meeting at the very stewards, the Central Avenue Stewart's last summer and talked about how to keep the store open. And out of that came plans for creating a portal in which Stewards.
[00:03:51] Speaker C: Would.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Have a way to report nonviolent crimes and have better communication with the police. But instead, Stuart's chose to leave.
And I was able to talk with Gary Dake about this, and I'm going to play you that interview.
But there's what I wanted to point out. There was something that stuck out to me from that interview, and it's with this closure, with Stuart's closure. It's now part of a rash of closures in the neighborhood. Most recently, the shop right on Central Avenue is one of the five capital Region locations that's closing imminently. And with that closure, you now have grocery stores going and Stewart's leaving. There was a pharmacy that left.
And it's all toward possibly creating a food desert or exacerbating the existence of a food desert. And I asked Gary Dake directly about whether creating a food desert or helping to contribute to it factored into the company's decision at all. And he said, yeah, they considered it, but at the end of the day, they are not a social service business.
And for me, that's kind of it.
A lot of us feel like Stewart's is central to our upstate New York identity. And I think I still do feel that. And that They're a neighborhood gathering spot in so many communities, and all of that remains true. But at the end of the day, they are a for profit company and they're going to do what they can to advance their own cause, plain and simple. And so I wrote a column as much, saying as much. And you can check that out. It's on our website. I'm not going to read it on this podcast today.
I'm just going to play you the interview that I had with Gary Dake because I think it's important to hear from him directly. And I'll just warn you that we spoke while I was driving. So the phone quality is not, the audio quality is not as good as it could be, though. Jim Gilbert is a magician. He handles production and he fixed it up and edited a bit. So it is just a little bit trimmed down and cleaned up. So you can hear directly from Gary Dake and decide for yourself. Here's that interview.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: You'Re listening to the weighing in podcast with columnist Andrew. Wait.
[00:06:32] Speaker D: What'S going on with this store? I mean, what can you point to specifically that's been so problematic here of late?
[00:06:40] Speaker C: Well, it's a whole variety of things. I mean, we're not strangers when it comes to stores and inner cities.
It's been really interesting, as you look know, Henry Johnson Boulevard store in Albany, Brandywine in Schenectady, Court street in Utica. They're all in what people would consider to be tough neighborhoods. But usually in those three situations in particular, and there are others, even though the neighborhoods are not what are considered to be great neighborhoods, there's enough of a neighborhood culture that people kind of watch out for the store a little bit and they'll just try to keep the bad actors in check a little. But for whatever reason. And the Manning Boulevard shop, it just was becoming a never ending sea of. And a lot of it was little stuff. There are the big cases where a couple of weeks ago I got an email of a guy came in and just started loading up a duffel bag with product. So the social behind the counter, the partner says, hey, you got to Put that back. And the Guy throws a pot of coffee at him.
That kind of stuff. When you get to that level, that's not fair to them. I've got a lot of great people working in these stores. They don't deserve to be treated that Way. And items like that were just becoming more and more prevalent.
The city of Albany, they gave it a Good shot.
We worked with the mayor's office, we worked with the city council, and we worked with the police department.
I give them credit for trying, but I don't know what the route is, but that neighborhood just is becoming just hard to manage in and it's just not fair to ask people to go work in that environment.
[00:08:49] Speaker D: So how specifically were you Working with the city police department and the mayor? What were some of the specific strategies that were tried?
[00:09:01] Speaker C: They tried to give us. The police department in Albany has got a Tough know. My staff, I wasn't in the conversations personally, but my staff and representatives sat down and talked about giving us good ways to communicate when there are problems that they could deal with.
They gave us a way to report nonviolent, non Immediate crimes. If we had shoplifters, they gave us a portal to be able to put the information in so that they could pursue it when it worked for them.
I don't expect them to have a police officer standing inside the shop or coming every time we have a shoplifter there are bigger problems than that in the city of Albany. I totally understand that.
I don't deserve special treatment.
And do you have any sort of.
[00:10:17] Speaker D: Data, or was there a straw that broke the camel's back here? I mean, was that coffee pot incident kind of.
[00:10:26] Speaker C: We had been contemplating this for a while, and the coffee pot incident certainly accelerated my timeline a little bit. That was what I just said. All right, we got to pull the plug here. It was probably going to happen sometime after the holidays anyway, but at that point, it was just enough. I don't want to get somebody hurt.
[00:10:53] Speaker D: Has the store been struggling financially, too? IS THAT A Piece of it?
[00:11:00] Speaker C: The store is making money. It's not a top performer. It's a non gas store. It's a medium.
It's below average in total volume.
But it was still making money. It wasn't a profit maximization move to close this store like we've had others. That's the reason we closed them, because we simply can't if the business has evolved. But in that store, it wasn't the money, even if we weren't losing the money, that we were on shoplifting, because even after the shoplifting, we were still profitable. But let's put it this way, there were not many stores where I would trade partner safety for more money. On the bottom line, that's a very short term situation.
[00:11:56] Speaker D: Have you ever closed a store because of crime before?
[00:12:01] Speaker C: Not in my 20 years at the helm, so I don't believe we have.
For us, most of our store closings are either we can no longer provide the service as we try to expand, or we find a better location we've built down the street from places before, but it's usually either that or lack of profitability.
[00:12:26] Speaker D: And I guess with the press release, and this is what struck, I think, a lot of people, it's just fairly explicit in terms of problems. And I guess, why make the decision to be so explicit in the press release about crime being the reason that this store is closing, rather than just saying we're closing the store?
[00:12:48] Speaker C: There's been a lot of conversation. Obviously, given your profession, you follow the news, and there's a lot in the news about this issue nationally.
This is part of a bigger narrative, really, and it's just sort of an opportunity to get people talking about it and figuring out maybe it'll be something that spurs somebody to come up with a solution.
[00:13:17] Speaker D: Yeah. Is there a way to say, are the problems tenfold different, worse than at, say, the brandy wine store? Because obviously at those stores, you must be also dealing with similar kinds of issues.
[00:13:31] Speaker B: I mean, at least to some degree.
[00:13:34] Speaker C: If you think about any group of people, you've got more or less a bell curve of people that are really nice and people that are really unpleasant, and most of the people fall in the middle. And like I said, this shop, there were just more people at the wrong end of the curve. And I don't have stats. This isn't something that there was some quantitative formula to determine when to close the store based on how many people swore at somebody working behind the counter. But it had just become unrelenting. And as I said, when it got to the point where nobody wanted to work there, and I don't mean to say nobody, there are people that still, the folks that were in that store were troopers. But when trying to get somebody from another store to go there, but you get to the point you have to beg people to propol a shift in that store that tells you that we try to be a refuge in a fun place to go, pleasant place to be. Right. And it just wasn't happening.
[00:14:48] Speaker D: Yeah. And when was this decision actually made? Actually finalized?
[00:14:53] Speaker C: We made the final decision probably two weeks ago. Oh, wow. Okay. Is when we made the final decision.
[00:15:01] Speaker D: And when was that coffee pot incident?
[00:15:04] Speaker C: It was right before that.
[00:15:05] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:15:05] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:15:06] Speaker D: So that really was just like.
[00:15:09] Speaker C: It was the straw that broke the camel's back. We had had a lot of discussions about it because we go through, we're running a business. We go through and have a conversation about once every three months about are there stores that we should take a look at closing and are there new real estate opportunities?
Because sometimes you build a new store and it puts an old store out of business. When we opened McLenning in Connectady, a lot of others connected. These stores lost business to it. That's what happens when you infill. We haven't had to close anybody there, but we're certainly going to be watching every other store nearby to see how it gets affected.
So they're regular discussions and this one just kept coming up.
[00:15:56] Speaker D: And then the one thing I wanted to ask about is part of what people love about Stewart's is that it's a one stop shop. I mean, you can get eggs, you can get milk, you can even get fresh produce. It's not the supply of the grocery store, but still, in a neighborhood like where the Manning Boulevard one was, are you worried that it can create a bit of a food desert in some way?
Has that crossed your mind? Like, it was a place that people could depend on. Maybe.
[00:16:26] Speaker C: It came up in the conversation. For sure.
We gave that some weight. We decided not to let that be a deciding factor. I think we had a conversation with one Albany politician who said that he didn't believe that it was going to be a food desert situation. He said most people in Albany are able to find food downtown and a tremendous number of them are driving out to supermarkets.
But yes, the conversation came up in the end.
We're not a social service business. Sure, we did give the mayor's office a heads up that we were going to do this before we did it. Right. Obviously not as much time as they probably would have liked.
But I also knew that as soon as I called the mayor's office, the first conference was going to be to try to talk me out of it. Right.
She did her job. She tried, and I don't blame her for that. I would expect Mayor McCarthy to talk more out of it if I called him and told closing one. It's connected. That's what they're supposed to.
Yep. All right.
[00:17:44] Speaker D: Well, I appreciate the call and appreciate all the insights. You know, you've been a big help.
[00:17:51] Speaker C: So thanks for giving a call. All right, Andrew.
[00:17:55] Speaker D: All right, thanks, Gary.
[00:18:02] Speaker A: You're listening to the weighing in podcast with columnist Andrew Wait.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: And now we'll turn to reader response.
And I'm just going to focus on one piece. Last week I wrote about this whole situation in Rotterdam where the town shut down, or allegedly shut down, a drag queen story hour at the pretty Paw Cat Lounge. And that story was getting a lot of buzz with pretty much people, even if they didn't agree with the idea of a drag queen story hour, especially a kid friendly drag queen story hour, which social media made it seem like this was going to be a kid friendly event. Even if they didn't agree with the idea of that event, they did feel like the town had overreached in its decision to send a zoning officer to basically investigate this specific event when they don't investigate other events or investigate other businesses. And so the responses were generally expressing dismay toward the town. Some people just wrote, bravo, got some thumbs up. But here's just. I'll share a couple more detailed responses. This is from Lois in Niski Una. She wrote, Andrew, you have a unique way of making me really think deeply about my beliefs and feelings. I love that about your writing. I so appreciate the facts that you present. I think instilling fear is the way to manipulate and divide people. Unfortunately, it seems to be working well in many different scenarios. Thank you for your well investigated journalism that makes me evaluate and reevaluate my thoughts and feelings.
I expect you will be getting a lot of reactions to this article. I hope it made people think before reacting. Thank you. And then from Bob in he says he typically enjoys the column. And then he writes, I had somehow missed the kerfuffle over the drag queen story hour at pretty Paws. I live in Princetown on the Rotterdam border and apparently I need to get out more. I think your column could be summed up in one of your beginning sentences, and that sentence is but one thing's clear, the situation reflects exactly what happens when local officials succumb to the culture wars. Then Bob writes, Rotterdam has a long history of spirited politics, but the last few years have really made me wonder. When Joseph Mastriani, noted for his incendiary social media postings on 911 and COVID and disdain for masks, was elected, I knew he had entertainment potential. When he persuaded the town board to vote 40 to fund an election audit, I was impressed by his leadership skills and powers of persuasion. Clearly, an energetic reporter could find considerable story material just by following him around.
More seriously, I'm saddened to see this drag queen nonsense taking root in our area. As a retired librarian, I've been following with increasing alarm the story of the disaster at the Rockwell Falls Public Library in Lake Luzerne. After a proposed drag queen program and the ensuing fallout, most of the staff quit, the library is closed, and some of the board resigned. I've told some of my colleagues, you know, we could be next. Looks like I was more right than I knew. Keep up the good fight.
That's it for this week's episode of the podcast. No episode next week with Thanksgiving happening.
Thanks to Aaron Palaya, who handles marketing for this podcast, and to Jim Gilbert, again, who does wonders on production. I'm Andrew Waite. Take care.
