![]() They've had to restock their inventory more often than planned due to a very steady flow of customers, particularly on football Saturdays. Since Argus opened in August, Brinkerhoff and Sample say most of the surprises they've encountered have been good ones. "Sometimes people can't get there, or they need something else on weekends." "It seemed like a good opportunity for people to get my product other than at farmers markets, because I'm only at markets two days a week," says Ann Arbor farmer Joan Ernst, who sells at Argus and the Ann Arbor Farmers Market. While Argus might seem like a competitor to the Ann Arbor Farmers Market, Brinkerhoff and Sample intend for the two to complement each other in bringing customers to local producers. The business is incorporated as a low-profit limited liability company, a legal entity bridging the gap between a non-profit and a traditional LLC. Produce, meats and dairy are each sorted by grower Argus deals with 60 Michigan and Ohio producers, who set their own prices and take home 80 percent of the gross. A coffee bar sits right inside the front door, and beyond that the market proper. The finished market is cozy and inviting, with an assortment of chairs and tables for customers to relax out front and decorative corn growing overhead on the roof. Brinkerhoff says the building checked off each item on their wish list for a location: "downtown, accessible by foot, affordable…cool and a little bit funky." Not hearing any such negative response, the couple went ahead and selected a site for the store –a former automotive garage at Liberty and 2nd Street. We need to find somebody who tells us this is a really bad idea.'" "We made a list and we said, 'Here are the things we've got to do. "We were pretty methodical," Sample says. Sample says they did their research, consulting over 100 local farmers, real estate developers, city leaders and other community members. But as they settled into middle age and an empty nest, they were ready to make a change. After meeting while in business school at U-M, he worked in the startup phase of several biotech companies, she in industrial gases and the auto industry. Less natural was the career transition Brinkerhoff, 49, and Sample, 53, were to embark on. "When we saw it, we said 'Ann Arbor really needs a place like this,'" Sample says. The married couple first hatched the idea last summer when they discovered a similar business, Local Roots, while dropping their son off at school in Wooster, Ohio. "We just thought it was a little harder than it should be."īrinkerhoff and Kathy Sample are the owners of the recently opened Argus Farm Stop, a year-round all-local market and coffee shop in downtown Ann Arbor. "If you wanted to buy a dinner, you could go to the farmer's market for some things, you could kind of hunt out the local section of a store for another, you could call another farmer you know to arrange for something else," he says. Bill Brinkerhoff likes to shop and eat local, but he says doing so can entail "a scavenger hunt, almost." ![]()
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