Reading Edwin Hoover’s essay on the downside of growth reawakened a seminal memory of my childhood. In the early 1950s Phil’s was a narrow lunch counter tucked into a hole-in-the-wall on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Phil, the owner, was a gentle soul who seemed content to pass his days dispensing hamburgers and milk shakes to ten-year-old twerps like me. But his wife, Rose, had bigger ideas.
At Rose’s urging, Phil moved into a larger space on the corner—a real restaurant with tables and waitresses. But Phil’s new place encountered problems from the start. Now he had employees to supervise, menus to plan and a much higher overhead. He had a hard time replacing his old school clientele with new adult customers.
On Christmas Eve Phil disappeared. Rose went out looking for him. The restaurant was closed and dark. But in the basement she found him, hanging from the light socket. That image has haunted me ever since.
Americans tend to believe that running a business is like riding a bicycle: Unless you move forward, you’ll fall off. In fact, as Ed Hoover argues, many business families subsist happily for generations without growing at all. If, like Phil, they have no heart or head for expansion, growth can destroy them.
The proof lies in our updated list of “America’s oldest family businesses.” Most of these hardy survivors have lasted centuries with fewer than 15 employees; many have only two or three.
Europeans seem to grasp this concept. Last summer my wife and I had dinner at Chez Marcel, a charming little Parisian bistro in the Montparnasse district. The entire place squeezed 30 people into two long banquette tables, and the staff consisted of the graying proprietor and his wife out front plus two cooks in back.
I asked the owner if he were the eponymous Marcel of the restaurant’s title. “No, that was my father,” he replied.
“But how long has this restaurant operated?” I asked.
“Since 1919,” he said. And of course Paris abounds in such places.