When we sold the store in 1978, we still had some customers who were with us from the day we opened 42 years earlier. Some of our customers actually cried when we made the decision, as in some ways, it was like a family breakup. It was certainly an adjustment - not so much for me because I had been at Holland College for almost 10 years and Abe was ready for a change, so I don't think it was too difficult for him. However, it took about 2 years for Joe to make the adjustment. Joe and Abe opened Zakem's Real Estate in the building next to the store on Weymouth Street. It was quite a change coming to an office each day when some days there would be no phone calls or customer contact.

Success in any business is, of course, based on good service. But I did not realize how good our service was until we sold the store and started to shop elsewhere. I guess we just took it for granted that everyone treated customers the way we did. Another reason for our success was our quality meat product. We had a slogan, "Famous for Steak", and it was so effective that one of our customers would send our steaks out to her son in Vancouver. Each week we would go to Canada Packers, pick out our beef and have it aged for two weeks before it was delivered to the store. Our policy was that we would not sell anything that we ourselves would not want to buy.

We even had a customer who bought and enjoyed our steaks even though he had no teeth. When we asked him how he ate it his reply was, “It just melts in my mouth”. Of course we took advantage of that comment and gave him a couple of pounds of steak to have his picture taken of him smiling while eating his steak. This same man was a painter and since he was a customer we asked him if he could do some work starting Saturday and working through the weekend in order to finish up before Monday. No problem. He had the paint in the basement where he would do the mixing and prepare for the job. After a few hours, he seemed to be going down to the basement more frequently than normal and his painting began to be sloppy. Only then did we realize that he had found Abe’s homemade brew and was becoming

intoxicated and unable to finish the job.

Another popular and well-known meat shop in the forties and fifties was Mills Meat Market. It was located in a large old three story wooden building on the corner of Hillsboro and Clark Street. Frank Mills, son of the founder Tom Mills operated the store. It was a large operation and because he had his own slaughter house, he also supplied some of the other retail stores with beef. Every Good Friday, his store along with many other stores would open shop to show off their Easter Beef, but you could

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