PITTSBURGH _ On a frigid weekday at around 8:30 a.m., slabs of fresh meat arrived by truck to a store along the main drag of Brighton Heights, a Pittsburgh neighborhood perched above the Ohio River and known for its stately homes and quiet streets.
An hour later, Tom Friday's Market faced a revolving door of customers who pulled in along California Avenue and carried out cuts of beef, smoked garlic kielbasa, stuffed pork chops and an array of other meats, cheeses and groceries.
Behind the meat counter in the back, 61-year-old Tom Friday himself was scurrying along with his employees to fill orders.
"We stayed with our business plan and our traditions and our values, which was to keep the quality of the meat high and fresh," said Friday, a tall, rosy-cheeked man dressed in a white coat and a black apron, during a brief break in his ad hoc office _ a desk and phone shoved behind a meat freezer.
That may seem like a marketing platitude until you consider how the butcher and grocer has endured tremendous swings in business and neighborhood development for 61 years.
In surviving to be one of the last remaining stores where customers can find fresh-hanging sides of beef, Friday said many factors played a role, from strategy to luck, to maintaining an old-fashioned sense of customer service.
Tom Friday's Market traces its origins to a cluster of small businesses that lined Pittsburgh's East Street Valley area in the mid-20th century. "Back in those days, little areas like that had everything," Friday said. "They had a bar, pizza shop, barber shop, dairy store, bakery."
Moreover, "Everyone sold sides of beef."
His father, also named Tom Friday, opened a store called the Eagle Market in 1955 on East Street. It was a successful spot, with the younger Friday working as a cashier as early as 9 years old and learning to properly cut meat around age 15. By age 18, he was using the band saw and breaking down hindquarters of beef.
However, development began to creep in. When it became evident the state would be bulldozing homes and businesses to clear way for Interstate 279, Eagle Market faced the wrecking ball.
While looking for a new place to go, Friday said, his father had a serendipitous encounter in a courtroom. His store had been robbed. The authorities caught a band of thieves that, it turned out, had hit several other grocers in the area. The elder Friday ran into a fellow store owner who was planning to exit the business and who offered up his space in Brighton Heights.
His father moved in 1971, before the highway reached him, and renamed the store Tom Friday's Market. Ever since, it has been in that location, with its blue awning and windows plastered with specials and prices _ "Homemade smoked garlic kielbasa, $4.99 a pound," for example.
Around that time, the younger Friday went to college and got a business degree _ studying for two years each at Penn State DuBois and La Roche College. When he came back, he agreed to eventually take the helm of the store.
"My dad and I were close," he said. "It wasn't written in stone, but when I came back, he needed the help and he wanted me to stay with him, so I did."
Grocers tend to operate on a low profit margin. That became more of an issue when customers over the decades flocked to larger chain stores like Giant Eagle. It became difficult to cover overhead costs such as labor, utilities and insurance, he said.
"In the smaller stores, it was really hard to keep up the volume of sales," Friday said. "It was really hard for most small businesses to keep that volume up to pay the bills, so that's where the smaller guy got pushed out."
His customer base extends beyond people who walk in the door. The store has supplied several restaurants in the Pittsburgh area for about three decades.
Not bad for a neighborhood store, Friday said. "Restaurants come and go. They switch off and buy from different vendors," he said. "But we help them and they help us."
The store has found success in touting the fact that its beef comes fresh from farms and from cows that have never been injected with growth hormones or steroids.
"You can taste the difference," Friday said, comparing the locally sourced meat with that shipped in from the western United States.
The market offers a home delivery option, he said. For a $2.50 fee and a minimum order of $25, customers can stop in or phone their order to be delivered the next working day.
Word-of-mouth has lifted the store's reach beyond the neighborhood boundaries. Today, social media reviews and an ongoing "revival" of business in Brighton Heights has only helped, he said.
With 80 reviews on Facebook, the market has 4.9 out of 5 stars. A reviewer wrote in September about finding "this little gem of a butcher shop (after some) Googling this past spring" and talked about driving 30 minutes to pick up ham, chicken and pork chops.
Help has come in other ways, too. About 15 years ago, Tom Bulger, a longtime Giant Eagle manager in the grocer's meat department _ and a good friend of Friday's father _ was forced to retire after a stroke.
Friday asked if he wanted to offer some advice for the market.
"As I was growing up and working with different meat cutters, each one that came you'd learn something from," Friday said. "When Tom came, he taught me a lot about merchandising and meat display and brought all his expertise in."
Although Bulger recently had to retire again, Friday said he currently employs 10 people who are "hard workers who care about the business as much as I do."
Friday said his son has no plans to take over the grocery business _ but there could be another route to keep it going and in the family.
"I do have some grandsons, so never say never, right?"
