Stew Leonard Jr. seeks glory in 4,000 pounds of Wisconsin cheddar. At the East Meadow, New York, outpost of the Leonard family's eponymous supermarket, a cheese carver recently sculpted the two-ton dairy product into the shape of a rock engraved with the company's governing principles. Rule #1: The Customer Is Always Right. Rule #2: If The Customer Is Ever Wrong, Reread Rule #1.
"We are going to enter it into the Guinness Book of World Records," Leonard Jr says. "And we are going to win: largest cheese carving!"
If the cheddar triumphs, it would be the company's second entry in the book. The first was for sales per square foot. That was in 1992, the year after Stew Leonard's opened its second store, in Danbury, Connecticut. The company, with close to $400 million in sales, has since expanded to six locations in its home state of Connecticut and in New York. (A store in Paramus, New Jersey, opens next fall.) At every outlet customers are greeted by the customer-first policy, carved into actual rock, rather than cheese.
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