Photo taken from http://www.thymenaturalmarket.com/about/
I’m back and a wave of nostalgia passes over as I walk down Lefferts Blvd in Kew Gardens, Queens. It’s just beginning to feel warm too, as spring has just arrived and I look down at the shops I’ve known since I was a kid. It is strange wandering around a place so familiar because my absence has made the place all the more stranger, yet it is refreshing a site at the same time. Walking into Thyme Natural Market therefore felt both inviting and unsettling. The storefront has been there since before I was born. Sometime around seven years ago, the shop traded owners and changed names, but nonetheless retained the qualities that made it a staple business within the neighborhood. The shop was still a health food store, offering choices of natural vitamins, coffees, yogurts, supplements — you name it — oh, and a deli too. I even recognized one of the longtime employees of the establishment.
Once I was pointed in the direction of the owner, who was eating her lunch break at the counter, we quickly struck up an amiable conversation about her business. Her name was Nathalie and she had some interesting tales to tell (and complaints). I first learned about her roots in this business; she had started working about 13 years ago under the previous ownership and after going to culinary school, headed the deli kitchen. Once the owner had decided she had enough with the business, she was approached to take ownership of the store. Having been trained as a natural food chef at the Natural Gourmet Culinary Institute, she took the original menu and expanded on it using her own recipes, noting that everything she cooks is cooked to be healthy. And some of those dishes were not items you’d find in an everyday store.
“[Our signature dishes] would probably be the burgers, tofu spinach burger… we do a sweet potato black bean burger and we do an eggplant burger. We also do Tofuna which is a mock tuna salad made with tofu. We actually sell quite a bit of that,” she said. She even informed me of a substitute for chicken that she makes from pea protein.
After learning about some of her more savory dishes, she told me about her heritage, noting that she is Canadian-American. Both of her parents are Canadian, and while she was young she frequently traveled between America and Canada, opening up herself for dual citizenship.
Not everything she had to say was cheery, however. When she had first taken over the business, the transition period left a hole in the former customer base, prompting her to actively advertise her business at community events and through word of mouth.
“We didn’t have any email lists, we didn’t have any telephone numbers, we didn’t have anything,” she explained. It took her six to eight months before the business was back up and running. “But as time went on,” she continued, “there were a few obstacles that I felt affected our business. A Trader Joe’s opened up two miles down the road.” Customers were fleeing down to the $2.50 bus to catch prices 75 cents cheaper, she said to me. It was here I began to see how hard it was for small businesses to compete with big businesses and corporations.
Nathalie competes with these corporate giants through a loyal customer base and an emphasis on getting to know these customers and her employees. She spoke of making friends with the customers and their families as well as knowing the names of all her employees and knowing their families as well. Most significantly, she stressed the quality of her products. As I came to learn, places like Trader Joe’s could be labeling products from other companies as their own and using various farms and factories from foreign manufacturers that may not deal with the healthiest or best ingredients. Nathalie, on the other hand, deals exclusively with companies that she knows produce great, healthy, organic products. She used Jim’s coffee grounds as an example, saying that she prefers dealing with small companies that she knows will best support her business’ health model. Nathalie is further encouraged by the neighborhood’s growing population of new families and young people, which she believes is more health-oriented and would be inclined to shop at Thyme.
She lamented that the business did and still does face some serious struggles. She spoke of the great difficulty of dealing with the building owners, who happen to be the MTA. The block which Thyme resides on is host to a number of small businesses that have to deal with the sky high rent that the MTA charges them. The businesses lie over an LIRR tunnel and station, and apparently the MTA owned the buildings that house these businesses. However, the property on which it lies is public, leading to a contentious legal situation between the businesses and the MTA. Over the years, the MTA has been driving businesses on the block out for years; stores always seemed to be in constant rotation. Nathalie, at the time of beginning her business, was at a loss for what to do and found advice from friends and loyal customers, some of whom were qualified to give legal advice. Since the beginning, Nathalie has had to combat with the MTA and plans to come together with the businesses on her block to fight the MTA.
Some time ago, she told me, engineers came around and examined the building’s deterioration, suggesting that there are millions of dollars in repairs needed to fix the infrastructure. When she first started, leaks were so bad, inches of water laid waste to her floors. The damage became so severe that at one point, a broken piece of the floor in her storage room was shown to have a hole leading down to the tracks underneath, indicating a huge safety hazard. Not only was the MTA essentially robbing her of the finances to expand her business, they were not even properly maintaining the property (and continue to refuse to pay for damages).
Having heard all this, I wondered how Nathalie was able to wrestle with being a wife and mother, a store owner, and a victim of the MTA’s bureaucracy. Thanking her for her time, she gave me her card and asked that I contact her should I need any more information. I then left, appreciative that there are still businesses that truly care about the customer, but angry at the hardships they must face.
Nathalie, the store owner
