NEIGHBORHOOD STORE ASSOCIATION
Summer 2009
Vol. 11 No. 1
BY JAN JACKSON
Freelance Writer & Photographer
“People are the key to the whole story,” Gary Straube said of his success in the convenience store retail business. “You treat your people right and they will turn around and treat the customer right. A customer that is treated right keeps coming back.”
Straube, who spoke from his Darimart corporate office in Junction City, is the family driving force for the corporation’s Darimart stores. When he joined the company in 1972, there were eight stores. Today, there are 42 Darimarts located from Albany north to Cottage Grove and Springfield west to Veneta.
“It was meeting and marrying my college sweetheart Pat Gibson, that connected me with the Gibson’s family-owned Lochmead Dairy and Darimarts,” Straube said. “They are a true independent Oregon-grown family who with ingenuity and hard work had the courage to do something everyone said was crazy. In 1965, with no retail or milk processing experience, the Gibson family opened the first five Darimart stores so they could sell their own bottled milk. By the time they asked me to come aboard, Mrs. Gibson, who was still raising her family, was managing eight stores.
“I had no retail experience, but I learned a lot in a short period of time. In those early days I helped wherever they needed help. I learned the milk process by running the machines and loading trucks and then worked driving the bean trucks to the cannery in the middle of the night. Today, each family member is responsible for managing the different areas of the company.”
Straube, an Oregonian who spent most of his pre-college life on the eastern side of the state, graduated from Ontario High School in 1955 and from Oregon State College in 1959. Armed with a new BA in Business, his first job out of college was with Tidewater Oil Company where he learned that he didn’t like the oil business. He then went to work for Crown Zellerbach and remained there until 1972 when he started his career with Darimart.
The original Gibson family farm, located four miles outside Junction City still exists though it has grown from 300 to 4,000 acres. The dairy milks 550 Holsteins and is home to 500 more.
Straube, who believes that the future is bright for the box stores and the convenience stores, also believes their bane is regulation.
“The hardest thing about the business is finding good people, but we also have to stay on top of encroaching regulations,” Straube said. “Howard Gibson worked hard and had to personally make many trips to Washington, DC to fight for the right to sell milk from the family dairy in his store. We hire, we train and we provide full benefits for our employees, but we will always have an uphill battle against regulations. It was toward that end in 1996, that I, Chris Girard (Plaid Pantries), Terry McEvilly (Capital City Companies), along with several other independent retailers, put together the board of directors and started ONSA.
“Convenience stores are doing well because they provide a service and it’s taking care of the people – our employees and our customers – that will keep that success coming.”
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