Andrew Schoch

Introduction

Andrew Schoch (born May 10, 1850 in the Kingdom of Württemberg; died June 10, 1925 in St. Paul, Minnesota), was a pioneer in the grocery trade, owning and operating one of the largest independent firms in the Midwest, with goods delivered to customers as far away as Africa and the Philippines. Schoch anticipated developments that would come to define supermarkets of the mid-twentieth century. Offering “one-stop” shopping with multiple departments under one large roof, The Andrew Schoch Grocery Company outstripped most average stores in its physical size, capital, and scope. By the 1920s, Schoch boasted $2 million (approximately $23 million in 2011$) in annual wholesale and retail sales.[1] Andrew Schoch earned a national reputation as one of the country’s most enterprising grocers for his organizational and marketing methods. The story of his rise to success appeared in several trade journals, where he became illustrative of an innovative businessman who capitalized on advances in commercial enterprise, transportation, and technology to become one of the nation’s leading independent grocers.

Family and Ethnic Background

Andrew Schoch was born Andreas Schoch to Philip Jacob Schoch (born May 1, 1811, German States; died March 8, 1874, Watertown, Minnesota) and Magdalena “Anna” Adrion Schoch (born August 26, 1810, German States; died October 15, 1856, Kingdom of Württemberg) in 1850 in the Kingdom of Württemberg, a region known in the nineteenth century for its agricultural and manufacturing resources.[2] Andrew’s mother died when he was six years old, leaving him in the care of his father, along with older brother Frederick (born about 1848), younger sister Barbara Schoch Bonn (born July 14, 1854, Kingdom of Württemberg; died January 16, 1901, Maple Grove, Minnesota), younger brother George (born about 1855), and four other siblings.[3] Andrew attended public schools in Württemberg before going to work as a manual laborer alongside his father, while his brother Frederick toiled as a cooper. On May 11, 1866, days before the start of the Austro-Prussian War, Jacob Schoch left the German states with his young sons and daughter and boarded the Magdaleen in Bremen, bound for New York City.[4] There they joined an older brother who had come to the U.S. in 1858, before moving to Minnesota in 1868, the location the family originally declared as their destination on their immigration paperwork.[5]

Once in the Midwest, the Schochs separated, with Andrew living briefly in Carver County, Minnesota, attending school and clearing land for four dollars per month. His brother Frederick left Minnesota after a falling out with relatives and settled in Covington, Kentucky, where he resumed work as a cooper. Andrew never saw his brother again, only learning of Frederick’s whereabouts in 1903, after his death.[6] Andrew eventually settled sometime before 1870 near St. Anthony in Hennepin County, north of Minneapolis, with his sister Barbara, where both took jobs as domestic servants.[7] During this time, Andrew gardened for and lived with commercial lumberman Caleb D. Dorr, a pioneer resident of the state, who sent Andrew to the Winthrop public school in Minneapolis to improve his English language skills.[8] Schoch stayed with Dorr for approximately two years, intent on eventually giving up agriculture and entering business. On his arrival in St. Paul in 1871, he began clerking for German-born grocery store owner John H. Hullsick. His father died shortly thereafter in 1874.[9]

Andrew Schoch married Rosalia Schmeidel of nearby Eden Prairie in May 1874.[10] Rosalia had come to the United States from Bohemia (in the current Czech Republic) shortly after her birth in 1854.[11] The couple remained together for forty-eight years until her death on January 1, 1922. In that time, Rosalia gave birth to fourteen children, twelve of whom lived to adulthood: William F. (born July 18, 1874), Charles A. (born about 1878), Isabelle L. (born about 1882), Rosalia J. (born about 1884), Alice B. (born about 1885), Eva A. (born about 1888), Philip (born about 1889), Frederick (born about 1891), Louis C. (born about 1893), Edward J.(born about 1895), Florence J. (born about 1895), and Paul G. (born about 1898). Several of Schoch’s children eventually joined him in the grocery business, with William acting as vice president of the firm; Charles becoming a partner in the company; Isabelle working as a cashier; Louis serving as the fruit department manager; Philip engaged as the store’s secretary; and Paul clerking. At one point, seven sons and two daughters participated in the family trade, while young Rosa Schoch ventured outside the family business to become a music teacher. Florence developed tuberculosis around 1918 at the age of twenty-three and took up residence in St. Paul’s Pokegama Sanatorium, where she died on April 23, 1921.[12]

Schoch became a lifetime member of St. Paul’s First Evangelical Church in 1874 and donated generously to both the Evangelical church and the Episcopal Church Home of Minnesota, a facility for the aged, among other charitable organizations. He regularly opened his home to young members of the church for receptions and other church gatherings.[13]

Social Status

A prominent member of St. Paul’s commercial, social, and political scene, Andrew Schoch belonged to several local and national organizations. He was a leader in the movement to organize the St. Paul Retail Grocers’ Association and through his membership supported the St. Paul Produce Exchange. Schoch participated in the Royal Arcanum and Modern Samaritans, fraternal life insurance societies, and supported local organizations, loaning his delivery horses to the Grand Army of the Republic for use in local parades and encampments.[14] He sponsored both a store basketball team and “Winter Carnival Marching Unit” for one of St. Paul’s community festivals.

While Schoch never held public office, as a Republican he often was cited as “one of the political powers” in the St. Paul community, “to be consulted in any major movement,” while some declared him “almost an oracle to the aspiring immigrants from Germany,” who sought his business advice. In 1910, he declined the Republican nomination for the St. Paul mayoral race, declaring, “My business demands my constant attention, and if I were to seek this other place I could give to neither the thought nor attention I should.”[15] Upon his death in 1925, Andrew Schoch was fondly remembered for being “as noble a character as ever lived,” whose “life was a daily giving of himself to all those who needed him.” He frequently gave away baskets of food and fuel to charitable organizations “at little cost,” and arranged promotional giveaways of produce, earning him a reputation as both a generous individual and keen businessman.[16]

Business Development

Andrew Schoch’s path through the grocery business was not unlike many young, immigrant men who began clerking in a retail environment, learning the fundaments of the trade from behind the counter before moving up to either a partnership in an existing firm or opening their own store. Retail ventures such as grocery stores and meat markets proved popular for immigrants and others interested in dabbling in American free enterprise, as the amount of capital required to start one was modest. An enterprising man or woman in the 1880s could open a shop with as little as $100 capital (approximately $2,300 in 2011$) and a rented storefront. Unlike many who started in the grocery trade, however, Andrew Schoch parlayed his experience and entrepreneurial skills into a longstanding, large-scale business in a time when small stores and high failure rates were typical.

Schoch spent three years learning the grocery trade from John Hullsick, who had opened his store in 1858. Working behind the counter, Schoch earned $150 (approximately $4,200 in 2011$) his first year, a figure that rose to $300 (approximately $8,400 in 2011$) in Schoch’s second year of employment.[17] During his time with Hullsick, Schoch pondered moving with a relative further west to Oregon, which according to Schoch looked like a “mighty green field.” Hearing of Schoch’s plans to leave, Hullsick offered to sell his business for $3,000 (approximately $61,000 in 2011$). Instead of trekking west early in the spring of 1874, Andrew sold one hundred acres of land he had purchased with money earned while working for Dorr, partnered with his cousin Jacob Wechsler, and purchased Hullsick’s business and small, two-story clapboard building located on the corner of Seventh and Rosabel (today Wall) Streets in St. Paul. Their first year in business, the firm of Schoch & Wechsler amassed sales totaling over $15,000 (approximately $306,000 in 2011$).

The firm of Schoch & Wechsler was just one of many small grocery stores in St. Paul. Given the fierce trade competition, success was no guarantee. St. Paul grocers numbered 101 in the 1880 City Directory, nearly tripling to 274 in 1890. A decade later, 325 retailers sparred for a share of St. Paul’s retail grocery business. From Solomon Abramovich on Eagle Street to Albert Zachmann on West Seventh Street, St. Paul boasted grocery stores ranging from small establishments — typically shops located on the first floor of a home or in a one or two-story wood building, operated by a single owner or family, including many immigrant businesses and few run by women — to substantial wholesale and retail enterprises, generally incorporated, highly organized, and financed with sizable capital.[18] Schoch & Wechsler’s $15,000 in sales their first year in business far exceeded most small grocery concerns of the day, many of which counted sales in the hundreds of dollars.

In 1880, Jacob Wechsler retired from the trade, leaving Andrew as sole proprietor. Ten years later, Schoch incorporated under the name The Andrew Schoch Grocery Company, with sons William and Charles serving as vice president and secretary-treasurer, respectively, and set about doing business on a large scale in the growing city.[19] Schoch initially continued retailing from the small store on the corner of Seventh and Rosabel Streets, approximately a mile west of St. Paul’s Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood, a popular area for the city’s wealthy residents. Schoch’s location might initially have put him at a disadvantage for catering to the area’s upper-crust residents, who had shopping options closer to home, but it put the grocer closer to St. Paul’s budding wholesale and business district, making it a prime location for expanding and capitalizing on large-scale trade from both well-to-do and working-class customers. Schoch’s business grew throughout the 1880s, prompting him by the end of the decade to move to larger accommodations to house his expanding trade. In 1887, he constructed a gothic-styled, four-story, red brick and stone structure at 282 Seventh Street, one block east of his original store. Situated at the intersection of Seventh and Broadway, Schoch’s new building boasted four floors and a basement “filled with the choicest of groceries,” and quickly became “The Store for the Rich” and “The Store for the Poor,” as his 1895 city directory advertisement claimed.[20] The grocer counted Great Northern Railway magnate James J. Hill among his regular shoppers, along with a host of St. Paul’s working men and women. In time, Schoch expanded his store to encompass nearly a city block.

Schoch’s substantial retail establishment paralleled the development of larger grocery firms in major distribution hubs such as Boston, Chicago, and New York. Boston’s S.S. Pierce Company recorded sales of over $6.8 million (approximately $166 million in 2011$) in 1911 for its four retail and wholesale stores.[21] While Schoch’s store fell short of matching Boston’s largest grocery retailer, he likely took inspiration from such organizations as well from the large department stores that began to appear in St. Paul and other major cities in the 1880s. Retail establishments such as Wannamaker’s in Philadelphia, Marshall Field’s in Chicago, and Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s in New York City consolidated their businesses by integrating vertically, bringing together manufacturing, marketing, distribution, and wholesale and retail services under their control. Professional managers coordinated the numerous departments and branches of each firms’ increasingly complicated operations. Schoch’s business records show that he implemented a similar model in his store around 1900, eventually dividing his operation by departments, maintaining separate accountings, and employing managers and family members to oversee buying and selling for each.

Finding success with his main store, Schoch opened a branch operation on St. Peter Street in St. Paul’s uptown area, sometime just before the turn of the twentieth century. Schoch’s desire to expand his business by opening affiliated retail outlets foreshadowed the chain store movement of the 1910s and 1920s. For Schoch, however, the move proved a flop. By February 1901, Schoch had withdrawn from the smaller shop, claiming he found it “impossible” to give his attention to multiple locations and preferred instead to devote his energies to “the old stand,” as he referred to his larger building.[22] His city directory advertisement that year made clear the state of the business, proclaiming, “Have no branches, only one big store.”[23] The uptown store continued for a time to carry the Schoch name, however, when his nephew, J. George Schoch Jr., former manager of the branch, bought the store’s stock, fixtures, and good will and carried on trade. The venture was short-lived, though, and folded a few years later, with the younger Schoch returning to clerk in his uncle’s big store.[24]

In today’s vernacular, Schoch’s “old stand” offered “one-stop-shopping” to his customers. This style anticipated supermarkets of the 1940s and 1950s by combining multiple offerings under one roof. In 1895, Schoch listed his store under ten different categories in St. Paul’s city directory, including: “Grocers (Wholesale and Retail),” “Grocers (Retail),” “Butter,” “Butter and Eggs,” “Confectioners,” “Fruits (Wholesale),” “Canned Goods,” “Cigars,” “Wooden Ware,” and “Lamps.” Of the nearly three hundred grocers conducting trade in the city, no other merchant claimed the broad range of Schoch’s offerings. The store offered a wide variety of goods, including fresh produce in all seasons — the end result of St. Paul’s efficient rail and water distribution networks — dairy goods such as eggs, cheese, and butter; baked goods; processed flours and sugars; as well as candy, canned meats, fish, and vegetables. Schoch’s 1911 store letterhead proclaimed the company “Grocers, Butchers, Bakers, Manufacturers, Coffee Roasters.” He integrated vertically, adding a manufacturing division to his store sometime in the 1890s. This included roasting and blending coffee — a process he electrified in 1894 with a three horsepower coffee grinder — sausage making, and pickle making. In the same period, Schoch also branched out into the wholesale grocery trade and began supplying hotels, restaurants, and railroad company dining cars with large lots of staple goods and supplies.

Schoch was quick to adopt new technologies to his business. Like most grocers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Schoch provided home delivery to his customers, maintaining an extensive stable of horses, wagons, and drivers for carting groceries. In 1910, however, Schoch began renting a motor truck, possibly to pick up large wholesale orders from area warehouses.[25] The following year, he purchased a delivery truck for the store, making him an early innovator in transitioning from horse-drawn to motorized transportation. The Commercial Vehicle praised Schoch in a 1912 article for taking advantage of the failure of a local truck manufacturer to purchase nine more machines “at a reduced rate,” which the journal claimed were “in daily operation in their grocery delivery” and had “resulted in greatly increased business.”[26] By 1919, the Cleveland, Ohio, based White Motor Company listed the Andrew Schoch Grocery Company among its “Annual Roll Call” of owners operating ten or more of the firm’s vehicles, with the grocer employing eleven White Trucks in its fleet.[27] Schoch maintained over twenty motor delivery trucks by the early 1920s. [28]

Schoch was equally eager to embrace new technologies inside his store. In conjunction with his home delivery service, Schoch offered customers the option of ordering goods by telephone. His business listing in the 1890 city directory indicates the presence of at least one outside line, growing to four in 1906, and eight in 1910 with sixteen telephone handsets available for taking delivery requests.[29] In 1889, Schoch had his store fitted with a Lamson Cash Carrier, a system of wires and pulleys that conveyed shoppers’ money from multiple “stations” or sales counters to a central cash register and cashier.[30] The mechanism allowed clerks to tend customers in multiple departments efficiently while centralizing cash flow, an advanced method for bookkeeping and tracking daily receipts used most often by large department stores.

Following a June 22, 1910, fire that caused $100,000 (approximately $2.5 million in 2011$) in damages to his building and stock, Schoch set about rebuilding and improving the structure.[31] He contracted in September 1910 with the General Fire Extinguisher Company of Chicago for a Grinnell dry pipe automatic sprinkler system, complete with 492 sprinklers, 12,000 gallon gravity tank, and interior fire alarm service. Frederick Grinnell invented his automatic sprinkler device in 1881, offering one of the first significant steps forward in fire safety. The addition of this protective measure set Schoch back a hefty $3,000 (approximately $73,300 in 2011$), but likely gave him peace of mind against future disasters. That same year, he had an electric freight elevator installed to help move stock the seventy vertical feet between his store’s basement and fourth floor. Made of iron beams and uprights and paneled with oak wainscoting, the elevator was capable of lifting 2,500 pounds one hundred feet per minute, eliminating the need for the kind of manual tackle and pulley systems that typically conveyed heavy loads from freight wagons to warehouses.[32] In 1911, Schoch consulted the Frick Company, manufacturers of ice making and refrigerating machinery, and equipped his store with a large walk-in cooler that required ammonia condensers, gas compression pumps, and a chain-driven flywheel that refrigerated 136 square feet of space.[33] Schoch paid $2,040 (approximately $49,000) in 2011$) for the apparatus, making his one of the earlier Midwest grocery stores to take advantage of mechanical refrigeration. Most small grocers in this time relied on iceboxes to keep perishable goods from spoiling. Schoch’s commitment to innovative technologies made his one of the most up-to-date grocery businesses in the country, earning him national recognition within the industry.

Schoch’s commercial success relied heavily on building a substantial customer base drawn from many ethnicities. Located in the central business district, Schoch’s store lacked association with any one specific neighborhood, unlike many smaller, immigrant-run grocery stores. German, Irish, Swedish, and old-stock Americans shopped at Schoch’s store with regularity. Consequently, he stocked his shelves with goods that tended to accommodate many palates.[34] Newspaper advertisements between 1895 and 1905 indicate that Schoch devoted much of his advertising space to promoting goods that catered to both his wealthy and working-class customers, regardless of nationality. Specialty meats ranging from pickled eels in jelly to pate de foie gras stood alongside staple goods like sugar, flour, and crackers that were found in most shops. Merging cosmopolitan goods with more mainstream offerings helped Schoch move beyond traditional immigrant methods of grocery retailing, which often relied on marketing to specific cultural tastes, and instead created a business model that focused on mass appeal and marketability — characteristics that chain stores and supermarkets capitalized on in succeeding years.

Schoch, however, did not ignore his German roots or St. Paul’s German community. Some of Schoch’s earliest advertisements were in his native language, where he proclaimed himself “St. Paul’s bedeutendster Grocerladen,” the city’s best-known grocer. Schoch reached the German community through several of St. Paul’s seven German-language newspapers such as Der Wanderer and Volkszeitung and “Zwischenakt,” the German Theatre Company’s handbill. He placed recurrent ads in the Volkszeitung printed in fraktur, a form of typescript and handwriting that began in the German-speaking lands of medieval Europe, and was used by Schoch potentially to capture the attention of “old-world” immigrants, who likely would have been familiar with the style. His firm’s German advertisements often paralleled those he placed in the English-language St. Paul Pioneer Press and St. Paul Dispatch, with identical dairy, produce, and bakery items regularly appearing in both. The marketing strategy reached multiple communities, providing the grocer with a broader customer base than the owners of many smaller neighborhood stores had. Schoch did target German palates, however, selling a variety of bratwurst and sausages, sauerbraten, various herbs and greens, and German beers among other specialty goods to satisfy his fellow countrymen.

Andrew Schoch’s ability to cultivate business from both the German community and among St. Paul’s large community of shoppers enabled him to build a substantial trade by the 1920s. In 1922, he became one of the first grocers profiled in the newly founded Progressive Grocer, soon to be the trade’s leading journal. Schoch earned recognition for generating nearly $1,500,000 in sales (approximately $20 million in 2011$) and employing one hundred fifty men and women, making his “one of the most enterprising grocery concerns in the Northwest.” Editors praised Schoch’s attention to advertising and marketing along with in-store displays, noting that the grocer believed “people will not buy what they do not see.” Cleanliness ruled, with clerks “dressed in spotless white” and floors “freshly sprinkled with sawdust” (a safety measure used to protect workers and customers from greasy floors), while walls reflected “like shining mirrors.” Some chain stores of the period had begun to place greater emphasis on sanitation and hygiene in food selling, forcing many grocers to take a closer look at their selling habits. Schoch’s enduring commitment to maintaining a sanitary environment, however, had earned him longstanding customers, many of whom had traded with the grocer for over twenty-five years. [35] Two years later in 1924, Progressive Grocer again profiled Schoch, remarking on his $2,000,000 in sales, his stock that was sufficient to supply “at least 100 small-town grocery stores,” and the several tons of groceries his firm delivered daily.[36]

Not content with his commercial accomplishments, in 1923 Schoch announced plans to expand his business and invest $100,000 (approximately $1.3 million in 2011$) building St. Paul’s largest retail grocery store outside the downtown business district. The veteran grocer was prepared to erect a structure adjacent to the newly announced Twin Cities Ford Motor Company assembly plant, scheduled for construction near the Mississippi River in St. Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood. Schoch purchased a parcel of land on Cleveland Avenue close to where engineer’s intended to raise the plant’s main building, placing his store in a prime location to take advantage of workers’ business. He anticipated the development of a large industrial center around the Ford operation, claiming, “Right now it looks like a big development out there and we plan a store which will be large enough to adequately serve a large, active district.” Schoch’s became the first commercial enterprise announced for the area. He chose to delay construction, however, “until activity in the new industrial district” was underway.[37] Work on the Ford plant did not conclude until early 1925, when it began assembling Model T’s. For the seventy-five-year-old grocer, the timing could not have been worse. In June 1925, Andrew Schoch took ill before dying of apparent heart disease on June 10. Remembered as “one of the pioneer grocers of St. Paul,” Schoch’s grand plans for a large branch store near the Ford plant died with him.[38]

Andrew Schoch’s business on the corner of Seventh and Broadway, however, carried on with his sons and daughters running the store, but not without difficulty. In March 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression, the Chauffeurs, Teamsters, and Helpers Union local, as part of a growing national labor movement, picked the Schoch Grocery Company as a “test case” for unionizing all department, food, furniture, and clothing stores in the St. Paul and Minneapolis area. Charles A. Schoch, who had assumed the firm’s presidency following his father’s death, asked the public for support against the action, claiming that the union’s demands for a forty-six-hour week and twenty-dollars-a-week (approximately $336 in 2011$) pay were in excess of the National Recovery Act’s requirements for a fifty-four-hour week and minimum fourteen dollar weekly salary. Schoch acknowledged that the union had selected the firm “because it has one the largest delivery fleets,” but lambasted the union for its alleged “acts of violence” against employees as “maliciously brutal” and not in accord with “working in harmony with President Roosevelt and his National Recovery Act.”[39] The union ultimately lost its battle to unionize Schoch drivers and the firm rehired several of those who had walked off the job. Despite the firm’s rancor toward the Chauffeurs, Teamsters, and Helpers Union, Charles Schoch nevertheless maintained he “believed in organized labor,” with he and his brother Fred regularly negotiating with the American Federation of Labor’s Retail Clerks Union throughout the 1940s to provide a living wage for its employees in accordance with union demands.[40]

By the 1930s, the Seventh Avenue location that Andrew Schoch had chosen for his store began to lose its prominence as the central business district for the wholesale fruit and vegetable trade. Traffic that once clamored along the bustling thoroughfare ebbed, taking new routes toward suburban supermarkets that began to overtake the grocery trade. This transformation, characteristic of many business districts in the 1940s and 1950s, uprooted many downtown retail establishments from city centers to outlying regions. Firms that stayed behind often succumbed to declining patronage and sales. Likewise, as supermarkets further modernized — not only in organization, but also in physical structure — older stores such as Schoch’s took on a dated appearance. By 1953, the once-innovative company had become symbolic of “the old-fashioned grocery,” as one newsman reported, “reluctantly” adopting new food brands while maintaining “the tradition” that “everything will remain the same,” including its employees, three of whom had been with the company since the turn of the century.[41] Faced with the choice of shopping at a modern store that featured new fixtures, wider aisles, and a larger selection of goods, patrons often passed by places like Schoch’s. The automobile, too, played a factor, as many consumers found it more convenient to shop at suburban supermarkets with expansive parking lots than at inner-city stores where parking was often difficult and costly. Schoch’s commitment to its old location and outdated ways contributed much to its downfall. After nearly eighty-five years in business, the firm closed and the building was razed in 1959 to make way for a gas station.

Conclusion

Andrew Schoch emerged in the 1890s as one of the nation’s leading independent grocers. His experiences form an important part of the story we tell about the development of American business and retailing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The grocery trade was a popular pursuit for many immigrants to this country for its low entry barriers, readymade ethnic clientele, and potential for independent economic security; few, however, managed to parlay these factors into large-scale enterprise. Schoch utilized his immigrant connections, learning the trade from a fellow German before opening his own store that catered to German customers and tastes. Newcomers to this country and St. Paul looked to him for advice and as a model immigrant entrepreneur. Yet it was Schoch’s ability to reach beyond his immigrant roots to appeal to mass consumers and that catapulted his business from a small, neighborhood store to one of the Midwest’s biggest retail establishments.

Schoch had an acute sense of national business trends. He organized his firm along the lines of a department store, engaged managers to oversee buying and selling in specialty units, adopted the latest in retail technology and safety equipment, experimented with the chain store model, and offered “one-stop-shopping” decades before supermarkets. In so doing, Schoch, along with other independent grocers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, developed fresh ways to acquire, distribute, and market goods in an ever-expanding marketplace. He brought the latest methods, organization, and equipment to his store, helping shift grocery retailing beyond the small scale and scope typical of many period shops, and altering the ways in which businessmen and consumers alike came to understand retail stores and shopping.

Notes

[1] All 2011 financial figures based on Samuel H. Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to present,” using the Consumer Price Index, MeasuringWorth, 2011.