run grocery store

from Outlook 2021: Our Coastland, Behind the Scenes

by The Coastland Times

Sugar Shack Fish Market & Restaurant looks forward to best season yet

Food-A-Rama: Behind the scenes at the family-run grocery store

by Danielle Puleo

Jackie Parker is no stranger to challenges. Running Food-A-Rama in Manteo with her three sons, Brandon, Cameron and Dylan, Parker has opened her doors through hurricanes, power outages, floods and even a worldwide pandemic. Overseeing every aspect of her family-run grocery store is now second nature, but the day-in and day-out goings-on of the business changed drastically in 2020.

“Normally this time of year, it’s slow,” Parker told The Coastland Times in March 2021. The steady pace of the off-season frees up time for the family to get their daily duties done.

“Where we’re family-owned, it’s different then a big company because we have to do it all, the managers do. We do all of the ordering, all the prices ourselves, we help the company work on our ads, do all the shelf tags, signs, all the cleaning . . . we clean the whole store every winter ourselves,” Parker explained.

All of these tasks at hand are taken on by the family members running Food-ARama behind the scenes. A huge part of running a grocery store is relying on the orders delivered several times a week. Brandon Leavel, Parker’s son and manager at Food-A-Rama, explained that normally, their delivery trucks make their way to Manteo on Tuesdays and Fridays to unload supplies at Food-A-Rama.

“That changed big time when COVID hit; we couldn’t get product,” said Leavel. “Our basic schedule weekly is we get a truck Tuesday/Friday, order for these trucks Monday/Thursday, so then we have a couple of days in between to do books, price changes and do accounting. But when COVID hit, couldn’t get anything.”

Before the pandemic hit, Parker had just started to hand her side of the ordering off to her sons. After realizing the nature of the virus and how drastically different things would be, she stepped in and took over ordering half her supplies once again.

Most local grocery stores on the Outer Banks have different supplies due to competition. Suppliers run the ads for each store and deliver the specific products that store orders during the week. During the COVID-19 pandemic, every supplier

Gregory Clark photo

Four generations of Chesley Midgett’s family were on hand to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Food-A-Rama in Manteo in May 2018. Midgett grew the business from a small mom and pop store begun in 1958 to a full service supermarket. For Cameron Swain, Dylan Swain, Chesley Midgette Jr., William Chesley Leavel, Jackie Parker and Brandon Leavel, the business is a family a air.

and manufacturer struggled to produce certain items and grocery stores dealt with the repercussions.

“Everyone was running out of meat, cleaning products . . . everything went to this super shortage,” Leavel said. To compensate, the family had to order food three times a week and then have deliveries coming in three times a week, leaving little time to do much else but unload trucks and stock shelves.

In the midst of it all, the family began ordering from a second distributor for more supplies, such as toilet paper. “We took on another distributor just to get wipes and toilet paper . . . Sysco, which we normally don’t use them, but were buying supplies from them,” Leavel said.

Even at that, products were constantly in short supply. “I was ordering 3000 pieces and only 500 would come,” said Leavel. “The supplier didn’t have it or manufacturers didn’t have it because couldn’t keep up with the mandate.”

Leavel explained that the distributors began telling them that even if they had more supplies in stock than what was ordered, Food-ARama would still be supplied less because suppliers were overloaded with orders. “They wouldn’t have been able to satisfy everybody if everybody was getting their full orders, so they were cutting everybody back a percent.”

On top of the constant battle to keep their shelves stocked, Leavel shared that Food-A-Rama began delivering groceries to those shut-in due to the virus. “Us, we were doing the deliveries and the shopping,” he said. Parker added, “We really put some hours in . . . it put us all here six days a week.”

While fighting to maintain their supplies, the family began to realize early on that panic has set in within the community. Customers were shopping for the same things every day. During delivery days, Parker said she would see the same people coming back and loading their carts.

“During COVID, even when they had shut down the island, we were running numbers the same as we normally would like July 4th and the summertime when it

came to . . . amount per cartload,” Leavel noted. “It shot us over the dollar amount that we were doing in the summer.”

“I kept telling people: ‘We’re gonna get more product next week, I promise you,’” Parker said. “I told them it might not be their brand, but we’re gonna get something. They still panicked, and that was the most stressful part.”

As Parker, Leavel and Parker’s son Dylan Swain sat with The Coastland Times a year after the pandemic began to take its toll on the nation, Swain shared that they had been accused multiple times of price gauging. “When eggs took a plunge, with us being a ‘Mom and Pop,’ we can’t keep but thirty crates/boxes on hand of eggs,” Parker said. “Big companies have pallets and so they held their prices down until they ordered more pallets of eggs and then their prices went up. But it didn’t hit when mine hit.”

Supply and demand is not something the average person thinks about while walking down a grocery aisle. “When all of these things went into shortage, our prices went up, so we had to raise prices,” Leavel explained. “It’s not us price gauging . . . our cost went up, so we have to go up.”

Despite the accusations from some, Leavel said many of their customers were understanding. The mask mandate went into effect immediately and Food-ARama installed Plexiglas shields in front of their registers to protect the cashiers and shoppers. Sanitizing stations were placed throughout the establishment, with sanitizer the family made themselves.

As if these battles were enough to overcome, the family faced yet another difficult challenge while operating during the pandemic: staffing. Leavel explained: “The huge thing during COVID is finding employees. One thing she [Parker] has told people is when COVID hit, we had thirty employees, but we operated during COVID with around twelve to fifteen, with ten to fifteen percent times the amount of work. We operated on a skeleton crew with it being busier than the summer, so that was crazy.”

Everyone was forced to adapt to rapid changes with the onset of the pandemic. After watching her mother and father, Ruby and Chesley Midgett, run their successful store, Parker knew it was her duty to keep things operating. Working with her family has made that duty easier.

“I get to see my family more than most people and I am grateful for that,” Parker shared. “We do good together.” Leavel added, “It’s a family thing, that’s why we’re keeping it going and I enjoy working with my family.”