Warren Williams serves smiles every day after 47 years working in downtown Rochester
Dec. 28—ROCHESTER — In an age where shopping is concentrated in big box stores and the convenience of finding anything online, general stores are rare and hard to find.
There is one still alive and thriving in the downtown Rochester scene, Eagle Grocery and Variety Store. The store is owned by the Williams family and operated by the three sons, Steve, John and Robert alongside their 92-year-old father, Warren.
Warren Williams originally purchased the space in the 100 block on First Avenue building in 1975 from the third-generation Hargesheimer family which had been there since the building's original foundation in 1866.
"We want a welcoming feeling when people come into the store and not so many places now have that," said Steve Williams. "They're very stale but the small businesses, they still cater to their customers so you have that sense of a warm feeling and our dad still being here every day helps add to that."
"I enjoy meeting the people every day, and it's pretty good to be getting out of the house and see the store still running strong," Warren Williams added. "I think the early evening is the best time to talk with them. It gives them more time to talk and listen, and when they are going home, they're feeling good."
Warren Williams was born on a farm in Iowa during a farmers' ration meeting during the beginning of the Great Depression on July 1, 1930.
Warren Williams first entered the pharmaceutical field from his time in the Navy as a corpsman at a military hospital in Norfolk, Virginia, in the early 1950s. From there, he served on a destroyer in Italy and Turkey.
Once he was finished with his service time, Warren along with his wife Ruth, went to Des Moines, Iowa, and he studied to become a pharmacist at Drake University while Ruth worked as a school teacher.
"It was a lot of hard work. Pharmacy classes required a lot of studying but it was all worth the while to get into the field," Warren Williams said.
The Williams family spent the next eight years in Des Moines as Warren worked at Iowa Methodist Hospital. The family moved to Rochester in 1969 and purchased the Hargesheimer-owned pharmacy on Nov. 1, 1975.
Warren Williams retired from the pharmacy field in 2015 and shut down the pharmacy inside Eagle Grocery that same year. Warren had celebrated 40 years in the location at the time of retirement, but retirement has never stopped him from coming in every day of the week to greet faces.
Warren Williams still spends close to 40 hours a week in the store according to his oldest son, Steve. Steve's mother, Warren's wife, Ruth, passed away two years ago on Aug. 1, 2020, but before her passing, Ruth Williams was in the store every day alongside her husband and sons.
"People really liked to see mom and dad in here every day before the pandemic began," said Steve Williams. "It was a good thing for both of them, and still for him as he would be home watching TV right now if he wasn't here. He gets to see people that still come in and it's that interaction that I think what really keeps this going."
The only hard-effort manual labor that Warren Williams keeps at is sweeping outside the store front as general store owners were commonly known for doing decades ago. The shoveling this time of year is left to others.
If people don't see Warren sweeping outside the store front, he is typically walking around the store helping his sons and customers or sitting behind the old pharmacy counter where he spent 40 years filling up prescriptions for Mayo Clinic patients.
Eagle Grocery and Variety is open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturdays and 5-9 p.m. on Sundays. The store's main entrance is off Second Street, next to Popus Gourmet Popcorn.
