Andrew “Andy” Carloss opened Midtown Market in Paducah, Kentucky, because the idea just wouldn’t leave him alone.
Carloss was born and raised in Paducah and earned his business management degree from the University of Kentucky. He took a tech job in Boston after graduation, where he was able to bunk with his sister. While there, he “fell in love with the corner-type market/grocery stores and delicatessens.”
The feeling that shoppers in Paducah were “missing out” on the kinds of foods he was finding in Boston came to him anytime he was back in Kentucky, as his job often took him to Louisville.
“My dream went from wanting to live in a big city to moving back to my hometown, and I just had this idea that I couldn’t shake off about having a hub for better produce and bringing a lot of those items that we couldn’t get locally into our area,” he said. Those included not only deli and prepared foods and a meat department staffed with its own butcher but also center store items not typically found in local grocery stores.
“It all started out as an idea that kept me up at night. The more and more I did my research and my business plan about it, and it kind of all just fell into reality,” Carloss said.
He didn’t jump in without dipping his toes in the water first, though. When he was in Louisville on business, he would visit Paul’s Fruit Market, a five-store retailer that sells not only fruit but also vegetables and gourmet items. Phil Thieneman, son of founder Paul Thieneman, and others there became mentors to Carloss, who worked for Paul’s for a time while formulating his own store plans.
“They were a tremendous help to ensure that it was something that I really wanted to do, because I didn’t have any grocery experience,” he said. His early jobs had been working in a sandwich shop, waiting tables and bartending.
Carloss ended up purchasing a former Myrick’s grocery store that was ideally situated between Paducah’s downtown and residential areas, hence the name Midtown Market.
“I always knew it was the perfect location because it’s midtown, and it’s easy to get in and out of,” he said.
Myrick’s had closed in 2006, and Carloss bought it in 2012, so it had been empty for several years. The building was gutted, taken down to the cinderblock shell, and rebuilt. The 8,000-square-foot structure now has about 5,000 square feet of selling space.
Setting themselves apart
Carloss utilized Paul’s Fruit Market as a produce supplier in the early days and still does from time to time. Paul’s sent trucks to the produce market in Chicago several times a week and could get “fruits and vegetables out of season that were far superior than the things that we could get here in town,” Carloss said.
For the store’s prepared foods program, he enlisted the help of a chef he had worked with twice previously. She developed items including specialty sandwiches, side dishes, salads and takeout dinner menus.
“We’re using fresh, local ingredients, like you would expect in a farm-to-table restaurant,” he said.
Sandwich choices include the Green Monster, so named for Boston’s Fenway Park, featuring fried green tomatoes; the Johnny Appleseed, a turkey sandwich featuring apples and white cheddar; and the Midtown Club, with turkey, ham, bacon, smoked Swiss cheese and other toppings.
The dinner menu changes daily, Monday through Friday. Options the week of Aug. 19-23 included Blackened Chicken Alfredo, Crispy Orange Chicken, Asian Ginger Salmon and Midtown Lasagna.
While the chef moved on to oversee culinary programs at a university, the foundation was set, and Midtown Market continues with many of those original items.
About every six months, the store takes stock of what’s selling well and continues with those, while adding new choices. Lunch specials allow them to test new items. Gyros were a recent special, and tamales, chili and fried chicken have been hot lunch specials during the fall and winter months, he said, “just to kind of switch things up from our sandwich and lunch menus.”
Midtown Market uses social media and in-store signage to communicate specials to its shopper base, which has grown more diverse over the 10-plus years it has been open, noted Carloss. When the store opened, it primarily drew higher income shoppers, but now there’s more of a mix, including young parents.
“We’re definitely getting more of a younger crowd,” he said. “Especially as school starts back, I’m seeing a lot of parents drop their kids off at school and then come in the store in the morning. Whereas, in the morning when we first opened and for the first few years, we were thinking about doing some type of senior citizen discount just to get somebody in the store before lunch.”
One of the draws is a full coffeehouse, complete with a barista and a selection of breakfast sandwiches. It also offers the convenience of a drive-thru window for coffee, sandwiches and other prepared foods, as well as small grocery orders.
“Now it’s very busy early in the morning, and then when lunch rolls around, we get a lot of call-in orders for lunch and dinner, and then all the time between is [for filling orders for] people who are able to order groceries online or call-ahead grocery items,” Carloss said. “We have runners here in the store, and we get it all together for them, and they never have to leave the car.”
Drive-thru key to growth
Carloss decided to install the drive-thru window when the store was being rebuilt, inspired by his sister’s experiences shopping in Boston. She had twins, and it was a major struggle for her to find a place to park, get the kids out of the car, into the store and do the shopping, especially if it was just a few items, like milk or bread or bananas.
In addition to parents, the drive-thru benefits persons with disabilities or health conditions that make it difficult to maneuver around the store, Carloss said.
In the early years, people weren’t sure about who could use the drive-thru window, thinking it was only for online or call-ahead orders. But that changed in 2020.
“When COVID hit, that part of the business really took off because everyone was scared to death about going anywhere,” he said.
Customers learned that they could get their groceries at the window, and they did. The store was able to stay open for the most part and even keep normal hours. Kitchen staff who used to handle the lunch and dinner rushes were redeployed to fill grocery orders for pickup at the window. While the big-box competitor tried to fill orders within a day, Midtown Market was able to fill an average-size order in 15-20 minutes.
“We gained a lot of business, and people got more familiar with our product offering. They thought we only did sandwiches or we only did ready-to-eat foods. They weren’t aware that we had a lot of the staple items that you would expect to see in the grocery store blended in with our specialty items,” Carloss said.
While the store doesn’t carry nutritional supplements, it does stock items that are gluten free, dairy free, organic, natural, etc. It also features a selection of Kentucky Proud items. For these, more than 90 percent of the item’s ingredients have to come from Kentucky. These shelves display items like hot sauces, salad dressing, jams and jelly, Carloss said. “It’s a big thing for our store.”
Robots need not apply
Midtown Market has about 35 team members and is nearly fully staffed despite the industry’s labor challenges. Carloss said he prefers to recruit from within whenever possible, especially when managerial positions come open. But when jobs are publicly advertised, it’s not the candidate with decades of experience at a chain grocery store who is necessarily a shoo-in for the job.
“We get people from grocery stores and they’re like, ‘Oh, you’ll want me. I worked for [this chain] for 20 years. I know how to do everything.’ That isn’t appealing to us, because we like to hire based on the attributes that you can’t teach somebody,” Carloss said. “We like strong characters and personalities, and obviously dependability.”
But Midtown Market also wants staff members who are comfortable making suggestions on how to do things better or more efficiently.
“Everybody we hire is smart, and they’re all part of the team. And as an independent grocer, if a great idea is presented, it can be acted on quickly without having to ask someone at headquarters or the board of directors.
“I feel like everybody looks back at that and realizes they’re more of a team than they are just, ‘Hey, I work for a grocery store; I clock in and clock out.’
“We’ve got a lot of different ideas on cool things that we can do in the store, and I think a lot of our customers look forward to things like that.”
While just about any business owner thinks about growth from time to time, Carloss is pleased with having one store to manage at this point in time. Over the 12 or so years since he opened the store, he has gotten married and become a father of three sons.
Opening a second store would require finding more of the right employees and having less time with his family.
“Every now and then, we kind of toss around some ideas, but we think we have a really good thing here. And at the end of the day, I look at a second location as not really improving [my life]. I’m not jumping out there just yet.”
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