(First of all, sorry — this is going to be a long post. But stick with me here… 🙂 )
We’ve all heard the call to “go local” with what we buy, and I generally agree with this. However, sometimes there are exceptions, and I think it’s important to keep this in mind when we purchase things. Because when we purchase things, we vote with our money. Through our money, we actually decide which businesses will flourish, and which ones will not. We, as consumers, have power!
While we should buy local when we can, I feel that it’s actually more important to support businesses with integrity, even if they aren’t local to us.
Let me share a personal example with you:
There is a local company, based in Colorado, called The Savory Spice Shop. There is another company, based in Wisconsin, called Penzeys Spices. I live in Colorado, and I visited The Savory Spice Shop back when it first opened about 5 or 6 years ago. Having a local store dedicated to spices was a novel thing, and I went there a couple times that year.
However, since that time, I have completely avoided The Savory Spice Shop because of a negative experience I had there. I had called them up to place an order that I wanted to pick up later in the day, and spoke with the owner, Mike Johnston, who asked me to email him my order. He spelled out his email address to me, and I remember thinking it was an odd address because his name was misspelled…but when I read the address back to him, he said it was correct. Later in the day when I went to get my order, he was quite annoyed with me. Evidently he had given me the wrong email address over the phone, but blamed it on me, telling me I must have copied it down wrong, and told me how long it had taken him to search around his computer and find my email order. After receiving such poor customer “service”, I never gave my business to that company again.
Meanwhile, my mom introduced me to Penzeys Spices, based in Wisconsin. She gave me a Penzeys catalog, and I’ve been happily doing business with them ever since, even though they’re not a local company. The difference to me is that Penzeys has integrity; every single interaction I’ve had with them over the years has been easy and friendly. I love this company! And I would much rather spend my money at a company I like and that values their customers, regardless of whether they’re local or not. (And as a side note, the Penzeys catalog is fantastic; in addition to all their yummy spices, it’s filled with personal stories, pictures, and recipes from their customers. They’re not paying me to say this, by the way; I just really love their catalog, and their company in general.)
Interestingly…the story doesn’t end there. Penzeys is opening up stores in Colorado, and they’ve gotten some negative feedback accusing them of invading the territory of The Savory Spice Shop. But it turns out that The Savory Spice Shop has quite a dark history, and in reality, they’re the impostor — not Penzeys.
Bill Penzey, the owner of Penzeys, recently sent out the following email to people in Colorado. It’s very interesting, and definitely worth reading:
I just want to let you know how excited I am that Penzeys will be opening a store in both Boulder and Colorado Springs in the next couple of months. I have a great respect for your part of the country. Time passes everywhere and we are all moving towards the future, but to me this area is one of the few spots where the future is actively and successfully being created. Where people take joy in looking beyond the day-to-day. Thinking not only about the impact of their actions, but also figuring out what actions might in the future create a better world for all of us. And not only are you thinking these thoughts, you then actually get up off the couch and do them. Very cool. I so look forward to being a part of that.
I also understand that there is another company that sells spices in the Denver area, and with our opening in Boulder and Colorado Springs there have been negative statements made about Penzeys, about me, and about my motivations for coming to the area. That I am doing this because I want to be the “Wal-mart of Spices.” I have tried to simply ignore these comments and let what we do in our stores speak for who we are. But these days this really does not work. Not commenting is seen as the same thing as saying, “Yes, it is totally true.”
So, some comments.
The other spice business in the Denver area has a history with my family. The person who started it worked for a period of time at my sister Patty and brother-in-law Tom’s spice store in Chicago. Patty and Tom’s Chicago store is an offshoot of the spice store that my parents, myself, my sister Pam, and many others built on the near northwest side of Milwaukee. The fact is this “Denver” business was started in Chicago in the middle of the night when its founder used his key, took Patty and Tom’s blend book to Kinko’s, and photocopied the entire thing.
I understand that we’ve all done stupid things that we later regret. But what will always stick with me is that when confronted about what they did after opening their store, and selling exactly those blends, they refused to stop. Ultimately it cost Patty and Tom a tremendous sum of money, most of their savings, for court costs to try to get these people to do the right thing. When their blend book showed up in court it was still in Tom’s sister’s handwriting. They never even bothered to recopy it.
Newspaper stories from their startup still live on the web. The Colorado Springs Gazette:
“So when I heard about a place called the Savory Spice Shop opening in Denver, I couldn’t wait to see if it would be like the shop in Chicago. And, though it’s not related, it is almost identical in almost every detail, from the candied ginger and dehydrated corn samples on the checkout counter to the water cooler with tiny blue cups.”
Their story has changed over time, but is consistent in always telling the story they believe works best. The Denver Business Journal:
“Johnson grew up in his family’s spice business”
Today their story is that they moved from their home in Chicago to Denver because of the weather, but the original story was very different. Once again from the Colorado Springs Gazette:
“Johnston and Chambers got their inspiration from a contest sponsored by Penzeys Spices, a Wisconsin company that has long sold spices through catalogs and retail stores…’The Penzey company did a survey asking customers to write in about why they would like to have a spice store in their town,’ said Johnston, who worked at the Chicago store for about a year and a half. ‘Colorado Springs and Denver were in the top 10 towns.'”
Without their business investors, franchise sales, and food media connections we can’t open stores as quickly as they can, so it is taking us some time to get to all the contest finalist cities. We are proud that our growth has been slow and steady and not about shortcuts. But really, if you intentionally copy the Penzey family business, and intentionally choose an area to launch your plans where our customers like us and want us to open stores, can you really be genuinely shocked when we open stores right where we promised we would?
Worst for me in all of this is the notion that my actions caused them to come to Denver. I just thought the contest would be fun and raise awareness, but I did not think about how others could then use the results to promote food not as a way to bring people together, but as a way to divide them. Looking back I now see the contest as a shortcut and something that was not who we are. It was a mistake. I am sorry. I will try to do better in the future.
At Penzeys we see cooking differently. To us cooking is something wonderful. We believe the simple act of making food and sharing it with others has the power to transform lives, to build communities, to make the world a better place. To us cooking is at its most powerful when each of us follows our own path without judgment from others. Good things happen when our own cooking is our own tale, the story of where we’ve come from, where we’ve been, and who we have met along the way.
For years the research has shown time and again how cooking and sharing food together leads to more positive and less negative outcomes in life. Science can tell us that time spent around the dinner table can turn off DNA sequences that otherwise would lead to violent behavior, but so far it has not told us why. I’ve been hanging out talking with cooks who were willing to go out of their way to get good spices since I was 10 years old. In these 37 years I have come to believe that the positive results of a life spent around the dinner table come from two things: validation and kindness.
When faced with good and bad choices in life so often our choice comes down to how we feel about ourselves. Without respect from others it is so hard to have respect for ourselves. There may be no better form of validation than getting food made just the way you like it. For birthdays my grandmother used to always let us choose not only our favorite cake, but our favorite frosting as well. Not much can make you feel more special than being seven years old and blowing out the candles on a banana cake with the special chocolate frosting made by your Gram.
Last Friday was my birthday and I had the same cake, this time made by my wife and six-year-old daughter. There really is a sanity that comes to life when we eat foods that recognize us for who we are, but cooking is about more than that, it is also about kindness. Cooking at its heart is an act of kindness. It is something we do without charge for the people around us. Make a salad for yourself and it all too often will be lettuce, tomato and dressing. Make a salad for you and someone else and suddenly it makes sense to grate some cheese or dig for a few more vegetables or maybe slice a hard-boiled egg. Why do we make more of an effort when we make something for others? Kindness.
Cooking is kindness and kindness works. It transforms people into families and families into communities. Where we have opened stores we have played a part in turning streets into communities. We have done this by respecting our customers and the cooking that makes them who they are. “Love to Cook-Cook to Love” is more than a motto for Penzeys, it is our reason to get better at what we do, to grow, and to improve. Our goal to do everything we can to help spread the kindness of cooking has pushed us to create a line of spices and seasonings beyond what anyone else is doing.
Now to see what we have spent so much time creating copied and stripped of its values to be sold as a commodity is heartbreaking for a lot of us here at Penzeys. I believe in the power of forgiving and forgetting, yet I just can’t bring myself to watch what I have worked for all my life being used to promote food not as a way to bring people together, but as a way to promote an elitism that is so destructive. I can’t put the genie back in the bottle. But for as long as we can keep up, wherever their stores spread their self-described “food snob” point of view, we will do our best to be there as well to spread our view of cooking as kindness.
These are our ideas. This is what we are looking forward to bringing to Boulder and Colorado Springs, a sincere appreciation for the richness that comes to our lives when we cook and how cooking ultimately is an act of kindness. That in reality, kindness is all around us.
Have a great weekend,
Bill Penzey
