It’s the two o’clock hour on a recent Friday afternoon at the Shoe Box in Black Earth, and Steve Schmitt briskly moves from customer to customer as part of the process of answering questions, measuring feet, fitting feet into shoes, and ultimately selling shoes. In terms of customer traffic, Friday afternoon is slow compared to a typical Saturday, but it still requires near constant human interaction.
Many business owners, even retailers, would be ensconced in a private office, but personal interaction is the only way Schmitt — owner of the Shoe Box and its latest addition, the Bargain Box, plus the Madison Mallards baseball team and Rookies Food & Spirits — knows how to do business.
Schmitt has engaged in a high level of retail interaction for nearly half a century, but he doesn’t even try to make predictions about the economy’s most fickle industry, other than to note that if you give people a good in-store experience and product to boot (no pun intended), you can’t go wrong. Watching Schmitt and his staff attend to shoppers reminds one of the heyday of American TV & Appliance, when then owner Len “Crazy Lenny” Mattioli wrote the book on customer engagement as a defining part of the in-store experience.
Perhaps this is the reason Schmitt, when asked whether he’s put the Great Recession in the rear-view mirror, gives you a quizzical look that suggests no recession can prevent customers from coming if they know they’ll be treated right. “Business is never busy enough,” says the seemingly indefatigable Schmitt, while taking a short back-room break that made him feel somewhat guilty about not giving shoppers his undivided attention. “We’ve got customers from all over, we’re happy to be here, and we’re never too busy. I can’t predict retail — even after being here 49 years and working 80 hours a week, I can’t predict retail — but we’re having a good time.”
The Shoe Box, which sells a variety of footwear but most notably athletic shoes, attracts customers from throughout southern Wisconsin, northern Illinois, and beyond. Schmitt can tick off the Illinois towns that many of his customers hail from — Freeport, Machesney Park, Sycamore. He’s pleased that patrons from his Baraboo store, which closed last year in anticipation of a new highway bypass diverting away customer traffic, have made the 20-minute trek to Black Earth.
“There are cars out there in the parking lot now from Illinois to wherever,” he says. “I just waited on people from Oregon — the state of Oregon. Maybe people across the street don’t shop from us, but we have a nice family run shoe store where it’s full service [in an industry] where it’s unheard of to measure both feet and every toe. Most of us here do.”
The fitness craze his store caters to shows no signs of ebbing. Schmitt believes it’s stronger than ever and hasn’t even peaked yet, which keeps the Shoe Box in modernization mode. “There are personal trainers out there and weights and athletic shoes,” he notes. “I remodeled this area a couple of years ago. This was all stock back here. I had a bargain room that wasn’t appealing and now we’ve opened it up and it’s all athletics back there with a great selection and range of sizes. I mean, people are walking and swimming and competing in triathlons, so it’s a big deal.”
No ducking the issue
The fitness craze is synergistic with Schmitt’s other passion — baseball. Whether that’s expressed through his sole ownership of the Madison Mallards, his partial ownership of three other amateur baseball teams in the same Northwoods League as the Mallards, or his lifetime devotion to the St. Louis Cardinals, the same boundless energy he demonstrates in the retail trade is reflected in baseball as entertainment.
On the day we spoke, Schmitt planned an evening trip to Rockford, Ill., where the Mallards were scheduled to play the Rockford Rivets. It was pitcher Luke Matheny’s turn in the Mallard’s rotation, and if that last name sounds familiar, it should. Luke, a redshirt freshman at Oklahoma State, is the son of St. Louis Cardinals Manager Mike Matheny, and he’s staying at the Schmitt home in McFarland while he plays with the Mallards.
Mike Matheny, a former Milwaukee Brewers catcher, took an opportunity to watch the Mallards play July 9 during a recent road trip to Milwaukee. He managed the Cardinals to victory in a Saturday matinee versus the Brewers at Miller Park and drove to Madison in time for the Mallards game that evening. According to Schmitt, he enjoyed the entertainment spectacle that is a Mallards home game, which drew 6,750 fans to “the Duck Pond” at Warner Park.
“He and a friend got here in time for the first pitch and hung out at a Mallards game and had a great time,” Schmitt says. “He laughed and enjoyed the between-inning promos. Our guys played great defense, our offense was hitting, and it was a wonderful time.”
After the game, Matheny spoke to Mallards players in the locker room and had their rapt attention. Like the 17 other Northwoods League teams, the Mallards are comprised of college players who have dreams of making it to “The Show,” and over the years some of those Major League dreams have come true. Several current big-leaguers cut their teeth in the Northwoods League, including star pitchers Max Scherzer of the Washington Nationals and Jordan Zimmermann of the Detroit Tigers, outfielder Andre Ethier of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and first baseman Lucas Duda of the New York Mets. Zimmermann, a former standout at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, hails from Auburndale, Wis.
It’s no stretch to suggest that virtually everyone on the 2016 Mallards would like to join them at the big-league level, so the presence of Matheny, who manages one of baseball’s most consistent winners, was an experience they’ll never forget. “We went into the locker room after the game and he (Matheny) did a pretty darned good talk about motivation and the Cardinal way of playing baseball,” Schmitt recalls. “It was very, very interesting. He had the guys’ attention, I’ll tell you that.”
While Schmitt is a diehard Cardinals fan who got to throw out the first pitch in Busch Stadium a few years back — he began following the team in 1956 when its star player was a true legend, Stan “The Man” Musial — his biggest thrill is owning the Mallards.
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Schmitt and Mallards President Vern Stenman also are partners in the ownership of Northwoods teams in Wisconsin Rapids, Green Bay, and Kenosha. Schmitt notes that roughly 95 major league scouts were expected to attend the recent Northwoods’ All-Star game, a testimony to the quality of the league’s players and their work ethic. Schmitt is effusive in his praise of the league’s players because he appreciates the way they go about their business.
“Our guys, our players, are great,” he states. “They play 72 games a year. They have two games off, two days off each year. The Cape Cod League plays 42 games. We play 72. On two days a year we’ll go to Lakeshore (in Mequon on the Concordia University Wisconsin campus) to play the Chinooks for an afternoon game and they will come here for a night game. We do that twice a year.”
Schmitt has never really calculated what percentage of Mallards fans come for the baseball and what percentage comes for attractions like theme nights, but he has a pretty good guess — perhaps two-thirds are there for the baseball and one-third just to have a good time. “I can’t stress enough that since 2001 our theory was to make everybody happy and keep people happy when they leave,” he says. “We want them to be smiling and happy, and it’s the darnedest atmosphere.
“Even last night (July 14) was amazing. The kids are having a good time, they are cheering, and it’s just like the state fair. My theory was to have the atmosphere just like a state fair.”
Cool Breese
Schmitt and Stenman also are partners in the operation of Breese Stevens Field in Madison, which recently hosted a still-in-good-voice Steve Miller in concert before roughly 9,000 fans, and in the Shake the Lake fireworks. Schmitt was amazed by attendance at both events, and he chuckled at one memory of the Steve Miller concert at Breese Stevens.
“Our little problem was they opened the gates at 6:15 p.m., and people had to run the length of the soccer field to get a good seat or a good place to stand,” he says. “I think some of those people still thought they were 25 years old and now they are 65, and they got about a third of the way and they had sore hamstrings, or they were behind their partner or their buddy and they’d say, ‘Wait a minute, I can’t move like I used to.’ So that was kind of funny.”
The effects of age notwithstanding, recent events at Breese Stevens have created a festive environment that Schmitt is eager to build upon. “Remember that 35,000 people live within one mile of Breese Stevens Field,” he notes. “These are just real people that show up to our events, and they will get bigger and better.”
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