Buy local from George, Melissa, and friends at The Kiva

Brisket (50501): Hello, Eugene. This is Brisket, your friendly neighborhood activist, urging you to support one of your local grocers.

Presenter: From the protest group 50501, your friendly neighborhood activist Brisket is boycotting the billionaire-owned and Amazon-affiliated food store, Whole Foods. Brisket has been asking why it’s so important to support local producers and distributors, and recently visited The Kiva and spoke with Melissa Brown: 

Melissa Brown (The Kiva):  One of the things that just blows my mind about Eugene is that these small little neighborhood places can be sustained, and we have a common thread and a lot of shared history, but we’re also pretty different. I think each of the little stores reflects the unique character of their little neighborhood. 

We have a real focus on organic and local, huge focus, and we overlap in a lot of different ways, and they’re wonderful resources. You know, we’re competitors, but it’s a friendly competition. And I think that it’s pretty rare in the United States for little businesses like this to be functioning. So it really speaks to the values of the community, and it means a lot to me to be a part of that. 

So I moved to Eugene in 1980. I was born in Albany, lived in Corvallis, moved to Eugene in 1980. I was a third-grader, and Sundance was our neighborhood store, so I grew up shopping there. My parents were vegetarians, but I ate meat and we would go—at that time there was Custom Meats and always to Newman’s Fish and just sort of shopped that way. 

And when I was 19, I was working at The French Horn, which was where the Beer Stein is now, which was a lovely, great restaurant. Somebody at The French Horn got a job here and then got me the job here. And at that time I was one of the youngest people to get hired here. And it was a huge learning curve for me, even though I grew up around all of this type of food. But it was the greatest group of people, just a phenomenal group of people that were working here. 

I worked here for a couple of years. I moved to Arizona because that was really my dream and passion was tribal arts of the Southwest of the United States, but also of Northern Mexico, because I love tribal art. 

And then I started a long-distance relationship with my husband, George, and we went back and forth for many years, and then it was time to decide what was going to happen, and I ended up coming back.

After we got married, we became business partners in a really kind of weird way. We were at the lawyer’s office getting stuff organized because we had a small child, and the lawyer said, ‘Well, do you want to make your wife your business partner?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah.’ 

And I’m like, I had no problem with that, I loved the store. I loved the people here. But once my name was on it, I had to start making decisions. So it’s now been 21 years that I’ve been co-owner with my husband and owner-operator. So it wasn’t what I thought I would be doing, it was kind of an accident.

But the parts that I really love are here. I love to cook. We’re very much a store for cooks. We have some stuff you can throw in the microwave, but, like, really, like, come. We’ve got great ingredients that, you know, stuff from right here. We’ve got stuff from all over the world. I think last count was like 70 countries. 

So the other part that’s magical about all the little stores is that the food industry in Eugene is really special, and we’re often the first shelf space, like, first retail shelf space for a lot of small companies. And so even with like Whole Foods, Amazon, we’re like in the food chain. Like, it’s an important step, you know, and people feel comfortable and safe approaching us. It’s a pretty open place, all of the little stores. And that is really special, I think for Lane County, I think it’s really amazing.

Like Coconut Bliss now, when it was Larry and Luna’s, we were the first store. Early on, Springfield Creamery, George was one of the first stores that had their products. 

I say this often, but one of my true, one of my absolute favorite things is that—no joke—like, on any given day, we’ll wait on, like, three different generations of the same family coming in at different times. It’s remarkable to me that there’s like that history. So we’ve got grandkids, great-grandkids of people who used to shop here in the early ‘70s coming in, which is really, really fun. 

My mom finally retired. She likes to work a little bit and then she gets tired of it. She’s finally officially retired, but at one time it was my mom and son were both working here with me and George, which was really fun. The weekend manager, her mom works here four mornings a week. The guy who’s going to be in here doing office stuff, his daughter works here, so it’s pretty, pretty sweet. And lots of Kiva babies, which is really fun. 

We have a deli that has prepared foods, and we make 95% of what we sell in there. So we make soups every day and salads and then sandwiches to order. Sometimes they’re a little tad exotic. I tease them because they tend to just list the ingredients that are in it as the soup name (laughing).

And the two main cooks, one of them has been here for about 37 years, Kate, she’s a wonderful cook. She and I started, I learned a lot from her and that kind of French Horn-type food, so it’s kind of Silver Palate Cookbook-type food. 

And then Mickey, who’s been with us for about 13, 12 years now, and she’s a wonderful cook. She really is. And a lot of them were my recipes that she’s made better and, you know, scaled up for larger batches as we’ve grown. And then there’s an awful lot that she does. 

And I am not great, even though I grew up here eating a lot of tempeh and tofu, I’m not the best at that. I’m really good with chicken and pastas. So it’s fun and pretty collaborative, and I really admire her work. 

I try to find talent or people with passion. I definitely don’t poach, I’m really careful about that. I try to find people who are leaving their job, just looking for a new phase or chapter. Not like career-hopping.

With the deli, so, for deli workers, we just find people who are interested in food and who can be safe around equipment and knives and stuff like that. For the cooks, generally it’s an evolution, like somebody gets in, they show a passion for it, we’re sort of working with them.

I think that we have the most diverse customer base of any store in Eugene. We have everything, you know: We have the municipal judge, and we have somebody who literally just got out of Lane County Jail and this is the first stop. Like we have city leaders, we have unhoused people. We have this huge community of people. 

I have made some particularly special relationships with some of the folks that live at Olive Plaza, which is subsidized senior housing catty-corner from us. And some of those relationships are life-altering. 

My grandfather was a preacher and was in rural eastern Washington when my mom was in middle school. New to their church was a family of missionaries from India. My mom became best friends with this woman, Vicky, for a couple years and they lost touch. 

Fast forward, I’m in Eugene. There’s an Indian lady that comes over all the time from Olive Plaza named Gladys. We become really good friends. Gladys comes to my house for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I cry about Whole Foods coming because I’m so scared. And she rubs my back and we’re tight. 

And then magically, in their 70s, my mom and Vicky reconnect through Facebook. Vicky says, ‘You’re in Eugene. My best friend Gladys lives in Eugene,’ and it’s Gladys from India! Like, what are the odds? This is proof I’m going to win the Powerball someday. 

But anyway, so Gladys and I were really close and then she started to really, her health was declining. And this is not a place, you know, if you’re poor in America and you don’t have family and you’re on your way out, like, not where you want to be. So she went back to India. 

She has a niece and her niece adopted a daughter and brought her home on my birthday. There’s a lot of things like that. 

And in this neighborhood over the years, like from the ‘90s, like, I mean, there were people I would wait on here that eventually did go to Olive Plaza. Because it’s a neighborhood place often, like there was a woman—she just moved to Olympia to be near family, but she was here. And then every year on her birthday, her son would call and ‘Would you take my mom, I got $50,’ and we know exactly what the mom likes to eat. And so we just put together a basket and deliver. 

During the pandemic, we did a ton of delivery, pickup and delivery and a ton. And I will say we didn’t have a single incident of fraud. People from the neighborhood would call, tell us what they want, which one, what looks nice today, give us a credit card over the phone. We’d take them their food. We’d shred their credit card at the end of the night.  Like, that was so rewarding and special that the community also supported us and was willing to just do that, you know. And that they know our little store well enough to be like the ones that organized it by aisle for us—it was really sweet.

And we tried briefly during that time to do a more formal e-commerce platform, and it just doesn’t work. Like, we’re very much that place where you just call and like Ray, his son called from San Francisco on his birthday and I could see his name and I’m like, ‘Are you Ray’s son?’ And he couldn’t believe we knew who his dad was. But it’s like, of course, he likes semolina flour.

I’m really good with faces and what they want to eat. I even had, when I was in Arizona, people that I had waited on here that were tourists in Arizona—because I had a store in this town called Tubac—that I would recognize from when I worked at The Kiva. Like I still remember, like Marc with a ‘c’ when I worked at The French Horn: ham, green pepper, the sandwich orders. Yeah, we laugh about that because some people have some very interesting taste combinations.  I like potato chips in my sandwich. 

Brisket:  Do you want to tell us the whole story of Whole Foods from the very beginning? Just like everything you want to say about the experience of finding out about Whole Foods wanting to come here? 

Melissa Brown (The Kiva):  Yeah, all of it was Whole Foods and them coming was really deeply personal to me. The summer, I guess it was 2007, I want to say, roughly. 

My husband’s from Kansas and we used to go back every year. So we’re in Kansas. It’s the night before we’re supposed to come home and we get a message to call Gavin (McComas) from Sundance, and we’re there and we get the call from Gavin. And it’s all of the stuff that the city’s going to build them, this $8 million garage. There’s going to be, you know, a land swap, this and this and that. 

And it was a conversation, I guess, about how to be sort of proactive to talk about what these small businesses bring and how there isn’t the need (for Whole Foods), basically. 

So we get back to Eugene and that’s when it starts. So we start meeting with Gavin. We start meeting with Paul Nicholson from Paul’s Bicycle Way of Life, David Monk, Bonny Bettman, who at that time was the Ward 1 city councilor, and we start having these conversations—also with Rick Wright from Market of Choice. 

And I started to go to city meetings and downtown merchant meetings like Downtown Eugene Initiative. This guy, Russ Brink, was the Chamber liaison. He had worked for the city and he was working for the Chamber. 

And I would go to these things and I would sit and listen to two city planners in particular, both now retired. They said, ‘Oh, we should be so honored that Whole Foods would want to come here, and we’re not even a tertiary market for them.’

And I would listen and I was a kid who grew up here, really bought into the Eugene value system, and I was so shocked and appalled and hurt in this way that they were, like, willing to give them so much money and justify it, and they couldn’t understand how we would see it as a subsidy, like, ‘You’re building them a parking garage!’ And at that time, there wasn’t the need for more parking on that side of town. It was really interesting and shocking. 

We just kept sort of learning, and I remember that it was the largest turnout ever at City Hall for people coming and speaking out against it. And it was, you know, Dwight (Collins) from Newman’s (Fish Company) and everybody. And Dwight had a location in Portland and really had seen a dramatic impact when Whole Foods opened up there. 

So there were some people regionally, and I remember Rick Wright saying, ‘It would be more fair if they opened up across the street from me, than what you’re proposing. You know, if they came fair-and-square competition. But, you know, the fact that you’re kind of luring them and doing this…’ 

So it was something like 230 people showed up to say, like, ‘No, we don’t want this,’ and ‘If they come, let them come, no problem, but don’t subsidize them.’ And the Council voted to pass it, and I think Bonny (Bettman) and Betty (Taylor, Ward 2) were the only two to vote against it. So it was a done deal, that garage was going to happen and Whole Foods was coming. 

Then, partly because Whole Foods had opened up a store in Seattle and there had been a similar outcry, and they, I think had to close it, and were going into 2008 with the big economic collapse, so they shelved it. Whole Foods shelved the project.

And there were a bunch of other things at that point. Bonny was like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ And my husband decided to run for the Ward 1 City Council seat. But 100% got involved in city politics because of that. 

There had been other things along the way of course. He’d been here for a really long time, and lots of other times where this location or a place in the neighborhood was sort of under threat because of a planning decision. And, you know.

So that really dramatically changed our life. We’re both pretty private and shy people, and all of a sudden, you know, it was, yeah. 

And I think also just all of those months of sitting in these meetings and sort of listening to how casually some folks that are pretty powerful here would be talking about other businesses. And feeling like we’re pretty humble, we just want to do our thing. 

But then they (Whole Foods) were back on and the city did a land swap with the Shedd, and there was a lot of stuff in and around that. You know, City Hall was supposed to sort of be in this location and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

And then they were going to break ground and then it kind of got delayed again. And then they built it. I think nine years—September was nine years they’ve been open. 

Well, I was absolutely terrified and a true basket case and really afraid of them coming and especially coming so close. And once they were going to come and they broke ground, we went and toured some places. We went down to San Francisco and I wanted to just see what was happening, how other people were surviving it.

I ended up going to Bi-Rite in San Francisco and meeting this lovely man who was working there, who was going to move to Eugene. He started talking to my husband. He was like, oh, you know, he was doing produce at Bi-Rite in San Francisco. And he ended up coming up and interviewing. He and his girlfriend at the time moved up here. She went to work for CAHOOTS. He worked for me for a really long time and then went on to Hummingbird, which was really sweet.

And I just went down for his wedding last year, like, it was great. (He moved back to San Francisco.)

I was so terrified. I was so scared of them. And I thought when they opened, it would be like a light going off, you know? And I was real paranoid because people would come in and if they were like shopping or looking or taking pictures, I would go up and be like, ‘Do you work for Whole Foods?’ Like, ‘Are you trying to, you know, steal my source?’ 

But then it finally happened, where a guy was coming in and he was taking pictures of Lively Organic peaches, which is a tiny, you know, it’s a small farm. They mostly sell direct through the market. And I was like, ‘Can I help you?’ And he’s like, ‘I’m so-and-so from Whole Foods.’ And I was like, ‘It actually happened!’ 

They made a big effort to try and put an emphasis on local Eugene products, and there were a whole bunch of local people that had their pictures up when you walk in. And I understand they’re a big account if you can get in, but it was pretty intense to see people that we had been in the trenches with, like, their photos up in the lobby. And there were people really concerned about us and gave us an extra discount on products so we could be really, have a really competitive price, and that was wonderful. 

So then it opened and it was a little bit slower, and it wasn’t like the light going off, and I got maybe a tiny bit too confident that it was going to be okay.

And then so they opened in September. That spring and summer were rough. We also were coming off of the city had closed Olive Street for the construction of the Capstone / 13th & Olive project. So we had had like close to two years where the main neighborhood access had been cut off.  So we weren’t like going into it in the strongest—

It wasn’t particularly fun, but it wasn’t horrible. We were down a little bit, you know, 5%, but it was kind of this, like, foreboding. There were times I went over and looked in the parking lot. I’d sit for a second to see, you know, ‘Am I losing people?’ you know.

And people in Eugene shop all over the place, like it’s almost like hunting. Like it’s pretty funny and great in this way, but I was really scared. 

And where it started to get better was when Amazon acquired Whole Foods. It helped because it did change people’s perception. And so there are a lot of people that still go there or will go there for one or two things that nobody else in Eugene can be competitive on. But the attitudes about Amazon are fairly negative, and it did help. 

So it changed it just a little bit, where people maybe go there, but there’s like a little bit of shame to it, you know. 

I can’t remember where I saw this, but it’s so true. It’s like, ‘Okay, so it’s fine, you want to obliterate small business, but, like, why do you have to literally take our face and rub it into the asphalt?’ It’s like that feeling of just like, ‘Enough is enough,’ like, ‘Come on.’ 

And it’s interesting because we have one person in the neighborhood who doesn’t like our store particularly, but he will nitpick about one or two items that Whole Foods has for less than we do. And he has made me so frustrated at times. I’ve taken a copy of his receipt and gone and checked. And, like, even with the Prime deal, our apples were less, you know, certain things. You know, it was like, it’s not—they’re not better on all of the things! 

Then it’s like once it’s Amazon, like, there’s no possible way to compete if they decide that they’re going to—

One area that I’m still trying to work on is how tremendously challenging it can be to operate as a small business owner in America, period. But in our community and to watch city staff and planners bend over backwards, beyond the beyond for them, including, like, letting them reorient the building. It should be up on the street, which is now, what, Ferry?

I have a drawing here of a fantasy for expanding our store (this is old), but doubling our footprint, and I went and talked with some city staff about that, and they were like, ‘No, there’s no way. That’s against, you know, the zoning,’ blah, blah, blah. 

And I’m like, ‘You literally just did that for Whole Foods. You just did that.’ So that exists and it’s strange to watch.

Like I said, I’ll never forget that city planner: ‘You know, we’re not even a tertiary market. We should be so honored.’ It’s like, you have no idea what’s here. 

And also these tiny little stores, how much we put directly back into the county. We work directly with so many growers, bakers, vintners. It’s an important part of the economy.

Knowing that we’re, you know, 4,200 square feet of sale space, we can’t be all things to all people, but for the needs that we can meet, I’m incredibly grateful that people come here. You know, conditions downtown, it’s not a walk in the park, you know, but I’m grateful for people that come here. I’m grateful for their patience with us when we fall short. 

And it’s really fun and special to celebrate people’s milestones and especially celebrating around food. It’s a lot of fun. 

Presenter: Your friendly neighborhood activist Brisket asks you to boycott Whole Foods and to buy from local grocers like Sundance and The Kiva. Brisket also suggests that with the city’s belated interest in economic development, planners might want to take a look at helping businesses already here to grow. 

For more on the boycott, see the website EugeneTogetherStrong.org. This story produced by Brisket for KEPW 97.3, Eugene Peaceworks Community Radio.