Pushback: Goodbye, emperors of ice cream

Al Norman

Al Norman

By AL NORMAN

Published: 03-05-2024 3:23 PM

Decades before Ben & Jerry’s, the Blake brothers of Springfield slipped some magic ingredient into their ice cream products that stimulated longevity. Pres Blake lived to the age of 106, and his brother Curtis lived to 102. According to Friendly’s legend, in 1935 “two spunky brothers, at the height of the Great Depression, opened a modest neighborhood ice cream shoppe, with double dip cones for 5 cents. The young entrepreneurs named the business ‘Friendly,’ with the intention of providing warm, caring, neighborly services to all who visit.” After more than half a century — and two locations in Greenfield — neighborhood Friendly’s will soon be gone.

The Blake brothers ran the company for 44 years, until they retired in 1979, with more than 500 restaurants. They sold the company to the Hershey Food Corporation. But even Jim Dandy couldn’t come to the rescue of Friendly’s. The “Emperors of Ice Cream” — to borrow from the Wallace Stevens poem — watched as corporate “rollers of big cigars” burned through the caring family’s business.

Friendly’s passed through a succession of corporate place-holders on its way to bankruptcy. Hershey Food sold it to the Tennessee Restaurant Company, who sold it to Sun Capital Partners, who sold it to Dean Foods, who sold it to Amici Partners Group. After he retired, Pres Blake, as a major shareholder, spent six years in litigation against the managers of his company, charging that Friendly’s new owners had mismanaged funds and moved assets into another restaurant chain. “I just want the future of Friendly’s to be secure,” Blake explained in 2007. But Friendly’s filed for bankruptcy in 2011 and again in 2021.

In 2011, Friendly’s Federal Street location in Greenfield closed, and today is a Domino’s pizza. Starbucks now wants to replace the Friendly’s on the Mohawk Trail. There are 16,386 Starbucks in America. A week from today, Starbucks holds its annual meeting. Employees are pushing to get three people elected to the shareholders’ board to represent worker interests. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has charged stockholder, and former CEO, Howard Schultz, with labor law-breaking, and unfair labor practices. Starbucks has 400 unionized stores — but the company has refused to bargain with any of them. On Feb. 27, Starbucks Workers United announced “a significant victory.” After more than two years, the company had agreed to begin discussions on collective bargaining agreements, and “a fair process for workers to organize.” But earlier in February, Starbucks joined Amazon, Trader Joe’s and SpaceX in filing federal lawsuits claiming the NLRB is unconstitutional.

On March 7, the Greenfield Planning Board will hold a hearing for a site plan submitted by Starbucks of New York City. The old Friendly’s parcel is owned by a Miami corporation. Starbucks plans a 53-car parking lot, a coffee shop with 62 seats, and a drive-thru window that can stack up to 14 cars at a time.

The critical impact of Starbucks is on traffic. The Colrain/Robbins Road intersection is one the most accident-prone in Greenfield. Seven months ago, Aldi’s was approved (at a Planning Board meeting that lacked a quorum) to add 394,200 new cars annually to the Mohawk Trail. The board never independently evaluated the Aldi’s traffic count even though our zoning ordinance allows the board to hire an outside traffic engineer, and bill the cost to the developer. They never calculated the potential traffic from the 14,500 square feet available in the Big Y plaza.

Starbucks spurned our core downtown, choosing to locate near Interstate 91 — like Aldi’s and Staples before them. The west side mall expansion will drain more shoppers from our traditional commercial center. The mall is almost totally owned by out-of-state landlords. Greenfield should ask Starbucks to present actual traffic counts from any of its units located near major highways, rather than pull a number from a traffic engineer’s Land Use Code manual for a coffee shop.

Greenfield already has great coffee retailers: Shelburne Falls Roasters, Pierce Brothers, Catalpa, Brad’s, Rise Above, and Bonnie B’s. If Starbucks opens here, I hope the baristas will brew up a campaign with the Starbucks Workers United, to make their coffee politically less bitter.

I plan on making one last visit to the “warm, caring” Friendly’s on the Trail. Pres Blake, in his autobiography, wrote: “The thing I want people to take away, is the need for business ethics. The most important thing is honesty.” I will miss that philosophy – which is nowhere to be found on the Starbucks chain’s menu – even more than I will miss the hot fudge and Fribbles.

Al Norman’s PUSHBACK columns appear twice a month in The Recorder.