Linda Falkenstein
Knoche's ordering by phone
"We're swamped," says Steve Knoche, owner of Knoche's Food Center and Butcher Shop, 5372 Old Middleton Road.
While most Madison grocery stores have some option for online shopping with curbside pickup or home delivery, Knoche's will actually accept an order over the phone.
This is a great service to some older adults who are not comfortable shopping online, can't master the sometimes complex interface of a grocery store website, or simply don't have online access.
It's labor-intensive, though. "We take their order, their charge card, [do the shopping], call them, take the food out of the cooler, and sometimes the freezer, find them in the parking lot," says Knoche. "It's crazy."
Knoche's, known as one of the best butcher shops in the area, ordinarily gets the majority of its revenue from selling meat, much of it to restaurants, says Knoche. The store supplied meat to 55 local restaurants, from Ale Asylum to Yola's Cafe. When the restaurants had to close their dine-in service in March, much of that business evaporated.
Knoche's is a small but full-service grocery store as well, so Knoche started the call-in shopping service about a week ago, he says. So far, it's kept everyone on his staff on the payroll, though "it's tough keeping up." Meat and all groceries are available, although, like every store, Knoche's is having difficulty keeping "toilet paper, sanitizer, and sanitary stuff" in stock.
Call-in has been popular among older people who are afraid to go to the grocery store, but others who are trying to avoid contact as well. Knoche figures about 60% of people taking advantage of the service are seniors. "Right now we're maxed out at about 50 [phone customers] per day," he says. He tries to turn orders around in an hour or so, and stops accepting orders at 4 p.m. (the market is open for walk-in customers until 7 p.m.).
Shirley Ryan heard about the service from one of her neighbors. "It's a good little store," says Ryan, a senior without a computer or a cell phone. She was hesitant to go into a supermarket to shop. "I call [Knoche's] early in the morning and can go right down. They come out and put the groceries right in your trunk." Ryan says that while the prices are a little higher, "you're paying to keep them going." She ordered everything from the store's housemade hotdogs to "aspirin and cough drops — I'm not sick but I realized I didn't have any on hand."
The Jenifer Street Market will also take call-in orders from seniors and those with compromised immune systems between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m.; last pick-up time is 3:30 p.m. This was started not only to help the immunocompromised but to thank the neighborhood for its support as the market was able late last year to buy the property it’s located on. Customers pay with cash or check at pickup; to pay by card, customers have to go in the store.
