Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 14, 1990 TAG: 9003133123
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRIS GLADDEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: FARMVILLE LENGTH: Long
"It was a real sleepy town," Varner says.
That was when Dick Cralle would sit in front of his furniture store, working on his tan and sipping coffee that his father regularly brought to the Main Street merchants from Walker's Diner.
"Now you can't find a parking space on Saturday," Varner says. "A lot of times I don't open up on Saturday because I can't handle 100 people in this shop."
The reason, she says, is Dick Cralle's furniture and rug business. Cralle no longer sits outside his store on sunny Saturday mornings. He's too busy selling oriental rugs and brand-name furniture to out-of-town shoppers at discount prices.
"Last Saturday, I sold $62,000 in rugs alone," Cralle says on a recent weekday when business was steady but not quite as frantic as it is most Saturdays.
Cralle is a hometown boy, a graduate of nearby Hampden-Sydney where he played football and pledged Sigma Chi. His father owned a grocery store and other property along Main Street. Cralle had no real desire to see the elephant after college, so he started to sell furniture out of one of his father's buildings.
That was 25 years ago. Long before Cralle became a business phenomenon. Long before people credited him with saving a downtown area that some believed was on a slow, economic death march like many small towns in the era of suburban malls.
Long before Cralle himself had any notion that people would drive to Farmville from Richmond, Charlottesville, Virginia Beach, Roanoke and Washington to spend $1.6 million a month at his Green Front Furniture Co. Long before Cralle bought the Dollar General Store and the Leggett's building and the Craddock-Terry Shoe Factory and filled their floors full of furniture and oriental rugs in such volume that shoppers have to overcome a sense of awe before they can get down to buying.
"This whole thing was not a game plan. It just happened," Cralle explains.
Cralle (pronounced Crawley) attributes the growth of Green Front to a business philosophy that he shared with his father, who died 10 years ago:
"We couldn't stand to see the mark-ups on merchandise. I can't play games with prices. I've got to move the stuff. I've got to be the king of prices. I don't want to be the same as anybody else. You've got to do it differently."
In this case, differently means discounting such lines as Henkel-Harris furniture and real oriental rugs 40 to 60 percent. It means no credit and no free delivery. Cralle now has six or seven bull-nose moving vans - he can't remember exactly how many, nor can he remember how many square feet of floor space he has.
He does know that he has five football fields of furniture - piled up and still in crates - down at the old shoe warehouse. And that he employees more than 40 people, including a sales staff of about 18.
There are four Green Front buildings on Main Street and a warehouse outside of town. One of the buildings is the old Leggett Store. The chain tore down Cralle's father's grocery and replaced it with a department store. Cralle bought the building when Leggett left town.
He also bought the Dollar General Store across the street at a "fire-sale price" of $120,000 that still astonishes him. He restored the pressed-tin ceilings and refurbished the outside, accenting the bare bricks with toney awnings.
Like Alexander, though, Cralle seems to be a man who has run out of worlds to conquer. He eyes the tobacco warehouse across the street covetously, but the building is still in operation.
As Cralle's business boomed, so has downtown, according to merchants and investors. Ironically, Cralle's good fortune has pushed him out of the expansion business as property values have soared.
One of the developers who invested in downtown property after Green Front took off is Preston Lancaster, a lawyer who has restored a couple of warehouses and is in partnership with another lawyer on the old grain mill by the railroad tracks. Some offices in the mill are already open, and a restaurant is planned, Lancaster says.
"We've priced ourselves out of the market to buy," he says. "Some properties I tried to make a pass at have doubled. You have to have a hell of an impetus for that to happen. . . . If it hadn't been for Dickie, I wouldn't have come downtown. He cleaned it up."
Farmville, with a population of less than 7,000, lies in the center of the flat tobacco country of Virginia's Piedmont. Longwood College provides a youthful corps of shoppers, as does nearby Hampden-Sydney. But at a time when shopping centers and large discount stores such as the Wal-Mart going up outside of town are turning downtowns into ghost towns, places such as Farmville need a boost from outside shoppers, merchants say.
"Everyone said downtown would die when Leggetts moved out, but it got stronger," says Monroe Evans, manager of Baldwin's Department Store where he has worked since 1946.
"Green Front has kept downtown alive. We would have had a hard time without it."
Allison Martin, assistant manager of Baldwin's, tells of the time she was in an elevator in Edinburgh. She and her son were engaged in polite conversation with a stranger who told them he was from Richmond.
"He asked where I was from and I said Farmville," Martin recalls.
"He said `Oh, the Green Front furniture town. I love to shop there.' "
Such recognition has a flip side, though, says Varner. "People on Main Street have worked hard to keep their businesses nice. I really get a little annoyed when people ask, `Do you know where Greenfrontville is.' "
But Varner, like many merchants, agrees that Green Front has boosted the town's economy.
There are now craft shops and law offices scattered around the Green Front buildings. Sissy Spacek comes up from Charlottesville from time to time, and Jessica Lange was recently there shopping, Varner says. On most any Saturday, out-of-town visitors jockey for seats with Hampden-Sydney students at Walker's, where the food is down-home and the diner atmosphere authentic.
In fact, Farmville's genuine feel - a real small town that isn't trying to be quaint - is what helps draw the visitors, Varner says.
"Out here, it's like a sleepy country town with a few things happening. They're impressed with the neat little stores. These stores aren't fake. They're real little country stores."
The heart of the Green Front operation is a cluster of cluttered desks in the front of Cralle's massive oriental rug department, a seemingly endless profusion of brilliant color hanging from ceilings and heaped in piles on floors.
"This is my pet," says Cralle, who has no office and operates from the desks like the rest of his sales staff. He's usually on hand to talk to customers about rugs. He's been known to cut a price when a flaw is discovered or throw a rug over his shoulder and haul it to a waiting car for a customer.
"It looks like chaos, but it's chaos that works," Cralle adds. He travels to India on a rug buying trip once a year, and he's even bought looms there that make rugs for his business.
"I've got three-quarters of a million dollars worth of rugs coming in in the next 20 days," Cralle says. He ships the rugs to this country in 40-foot container loads.
Volume like that attracts shoppers like John Happel, who drives up regularly from Lynchburg.
"The prices are usually lower here," Happell says, "but the main point here is that you've got such a selection. If you're a Persian fanatic, this is the place to come. We've brought relatives here who have taken rugs back to Chicago and Connecticut."
Cralle, at 48, seems to draw energy from all the activity. He's thought about turning Green Front into a chain, but he says he would only wind up competing with himself and that he couldn't keep his thumb on the pulse of the operation if he did.
Right now, he seems almost as amazed at the size of what he's created as any outsider. He's just enjoying the ride on the crest.
"I can't sit around and play executive," he says. "I'm a worker. I've gone six days a week for 25 years. If it quits being fun, I'm going to quit and sell out."
by CNB