Robin Wisdom has been shopping at Fleming’s Variety Store in Salem for many years.
To her there is no secret to the store’s 80-year existence.
“I enjoy shopping there,” Wisdom said. “I can be looking for something that is hard to find, go in there and it’s there. They stock items that cannot be found elsewhere, and they know what sells and what doesn’t.”
Wisdom, from Boss, said Rob and Karel Benowitz make customers feel at home and take time to help others. Plus it’s nice to see their children, Alan and Laura, grow up in the store just like Rob did.
“We have all gotten to be good friends,” Wisdom said of the Benowitz family. “They are all so friendly.”
When talking about Fleming Variety Store’s 80-year history, Rob and Karel Benowitz enjoy talking about the customer support and Rob growing up in the store, and how now their two children are being raised around the store.
“We’ve had wonderful customers over the years,” Rob Benowitz said. “We’ve had people from out of the area come in and tell us ‘we wish you could pick up your store and put it in our town.’ ”
Karel says it means so much for customers to come into the store and be amazed how Alan and Laura have grown, know how to count change with the best of them and have learned how the business world works.
“I’ve learned a lot just by watching and listening,” Alan said. “It’s a fun place to be with all the history.”
That history includes two important business decisions by Rob’s grandfather, John Fleming, and his father, Harold Benowitz, in the 1930s and late 1960s that helped keep the family business running.
John Fleming and his brother-in-law, Leon Howard, bought the Peck Hardware store in Salem in the 1930s. John and his wife Edna packed up from a successful farming career in Cuba and moved to Salem to start a business.
Five years later, Howard sold his interest to John and Edna. Their daughter, Grace, worked weekends and when school was out.
Grace met her husband, Harold Benowitz, while he was stationed at Vichy airfield during World War II. In the 1960s Harold Benowitz and Grace took over the business, allowing her parents time to travel
“That was a huge decision,” Rob said. “They were very successful and going into something they didn’t have any experience in.”
While mom and dad were minding the store, Rob was there to work and learn the family business.
“Dad knew what the farmers wanted and needed while mom knew what the women wanted,” Rob said. “When they went to market, they knew what would and would not sell in Dent County.”
The family also survived a 1954 fire that destroyed everything. But Rob said it could have been worse. Since the fire was in the winter, the family business didn’t have dynamite in the basement like it did the rest of the year. Back then the dynamite was used by farmers to blow up tree stumps on the farms.
In those days American Sales and Fleming were located in the same building at the corner of Fourth and Washington streets. But the Benotwitz family rented a temporary location and thus continued to operate on Fourth Street after the fire.
“Dad always liked working downtown,” Rob Benowitz said. “He thought we had a good location and wanted to stay downtown.”
In 1968. Harold and Grace Benowitz made a decision that Rob said ensured the future of the family’s “mom and pop” store.
Gradually the two phased out some hardware and merchandise and replaced it with variety items, or dime-store stock. It was a turning point in the store’s history, Rob Benowitz said.
“Dad could see it coming,” Rob said. “He knew that to compete in the hardware business in the future, you would need a lot more room for the different kinds of power tools, brands of paint, nuts and bolts and lumber. He didn’t have that room and wanted to stay downtown.
He called his father’s decision a “monumental one.”
Since then Fleming Variety continues to stock items that sell in Dent County, treat customers like family and have a little fun at the same time.
Rob said it’s been tough with small “mom and pop” stores drying up and the economy.
“We do carry a lot of things that the bigger stores don’t have, and in a small community that’s important,” Rob said.
With all the chain stores, it’s nice to know a smaller, retail store is successful and knows how to treat customers, Wisdom said.
