Stew Leonard Sr. Dies at 93; Founded ‘Disneyland of Dairy Stores’
Stew Leonard Sr., a folkloric retailer who expanded his namesake stores into merchandising meccas replete with petting zoos and mechanical singing farm animals, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 93.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, his son Stewart Jr. said.
Mr. Leonard opened his original store in Norwalk, Conn., in 1969 as a destination that promised fresh milk because it was built around a bottling plant. “You’d have to own a cow to get it sooner,” his advertisements proclaimed.
Bryan Miller described it in The New York Times as the “Disneyland of Dairy Stores”; “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” called it the “World’s Largest Dairy Store”; and it earned a place in the Guinness World Records for having the highest dollar sales per square foot of selling space.
In 2015, Business Insider praised Kroger’s customer loyalty program and Wegmans’s walk-in beer locker, but it concluded that anyone who had ever set foot in Stew Leonard’s “knows it is miles above the rest.”
Source: The New York Times
