MADE WITH LOVE Small-town pride promotes home cookin' at this Oklahoma store
Retailer: Brad and Sandy Robertson, owners, Zigeez, Bristow, Okla.
2:30 a.m. Alarm sounds, rousing Brad and Sandy Robertson. Sky is still dark and the chirps of morning cardinals and orioles are yet hours away.
But Brad and Sandy have no choice, especially as sole owners of Zigeez convenience store, a nifty single-store hangout in Bristow, Okla. In just a half-hour, the couple will open the doors and prep breakfast for a ravenous morning rush.
Everything's hot and yummy -- the sweet aroma of toasty biscuits, made-to-order eggs and breakfast burritos. All from scratch.
"From the time we open that door at 3 in the morning, it doesn't stop," Brad says. "I've had people tell me, ‘You know, Zigee, I want to stop to eat, but sometimes you're so busy I can't find a place to park.' Sometimes, between customers you're waiting on inside and the drive-thru window, you're just running like crazy."
Amid the bustle, the Robertsons draw aid from two other cooks. And as soon as the breakfast rush ebbs, the thought of lunch kicks in.
Life could be easier with prepackaged or thaw-and-serve. But not for Zigeez. "It takes a lot of labor," Brad says. "Everybody else is just buying [premade food] off the truck and heating it up and sticking it out there. We didn't want to do that.
"We're a small store -- really small -- with not that big of a kitchen. But we have different things they can't get from anyone else." The store also carries c-store staples such as soda, beer, cigarettes and other convenience items.
Despite the extra manpower and food-from-scratch approach, Zigeez keeps prices low, charging $1.40 to $1.80 for breakfast sandwiches, for example. Brad says he operates on a 40% margin on everything he sells: "We do pay our people good, too," he says. "But the numbers we run kind of cover [all the costs]. We could do better if we went the [premade] way, more money in my pocket. But you know? We make a good living, and I'm not hurting for anything."
Spoilage isn't much of a concern either. What little he has left after a rush comes through, Brad freezes to use for something else. Because Zigeez operates its foodservice program around the clock, what didn't get used at breakfast gets used at lunch, or even for the next morning's rush.
"If we don't sell out, it's always something that I can reuse," he says. "I can freeze it and reuse it for a different special, or something like that. Basically, I kind of know on a rough scale what we're going to sell for a day. Most of the time we sell out. Very seldom do I ever have anything left over."
Zigeez employs nine, not counting Brad and Sandy. Four are cooks. The space is modest, with only 1,300 square feet, including a small kitchen. So it's no surprise that Zigeez is looking to expand. If they can make it work, Brad says they'll add a dinner menu as well, perhaps one that will give his small-town patrons a place to sit down and have a steak.
"We keep talking; we'd like to add on to the store, make a bigger eating area to separate it from the inside of the store to give people more privacy" Brad says. "Our main problem in adding on is the parking area—we don't have that space."
The store's food, and breakfast in particular, is very popular among the small town's high school students. A quick search on Facebook, the widely used online social-networking site, reveals a group created by local high school students to sing the convenience store's praises: It's called "Zigeez is the bomb ..."
"They all come here, which sometimes makes it rough for my other customers that want to come in, and they have to wait until they leave," Brad says.
The town of Bristow is about 70 miles northeast of Oklahoma City, and about 33 from Tulsa. Zigeez donates much of what they earn to various community programs: "My accountant keeps telling me that I'm giving away more money than I'm making. I say, ‘Well, God must be keeping us afloat then because we still have enough to pay the bills.' "
Admittedly, the store's success is due in part to the lack of options in the approximately 4,400-person town, and Brad and Sandy repay their patrons' generosity by participating heavily in children's sporting programs and other events, in addition to their 12- to 14-hour days at the store.
"When you're up against seven other stores in a small community, it's scratch and pull," Brad says. "I have a competitor right next to me. You have to do everything you can do to stand out against the next guy. People see me volunteer, and they see me working from morning to night.
"Do we get tired? Yes. Do we get a little burnt out? Yeah. We just have to rejuvenate ourselves somehow, and some way we do."
2:30 a.m. Alarm sounds, rousing Brad and Sandy Robertson. Sky is still dark and the chirps of morning cardinals and orioles are yet hours away.