Schmidt's To Celebrate 40 Years In Business In March

Dennis Schmidt, the owner of Schmidt’s Market and Produce on North Sea Road in Southampton Village, worked in the produce business when he was in high school before serving for four years in the U.S. Navy and then going to college.

Before he knew it, he had a wife and two kids, and needed a job that actually paid enough to support his growing family.

Sure, Mr. Schmidt had a job with a company in Hauppauge that he described as “okay,” but it wasn’t fulfilling to him, he said, and didn’t pay much.

Then, one day, he decided to bring his boss at the time out to Southampton to show him around. The two men toured Southampton Village and the estate section in the village before Mr. Schmidt’s boss asked him if there was a produce store nearby.

Mr. Schmidt said he told his boss, “No, they do farm stands here in the summer, and they don’t have a year-round produce store.”

“He looked at me and said, ‘You can’t miss,’” Mr. Schmidt said. “That was my incentive to do it.”

In 1980, he opened Schmidt’s Market.

On March 20, he will celebrate 40 years of owning a produce business in Southampton Village — though it has not been a cakewalk.

“It doesn’t seem like 40 years. It went by really quick,” he said. “But I’ve seen a lot of changes. When we were first here, there were three supermarkets in town. Two of those are gone, but we have another market in town … that directly competes with me.”

Initially, Mr. Schmidt opened the store on Jagger Lane, across from where the Stop and Shop supermarket is currently located. He later moved to his current location on North Sea Road, across the street from the post office.

Over the years, Mr. Schmidt said, he has seen the demographics change dramatically, to the point where it has affected his business.

There seems to be fewer people in the village, and he used to have part-time residents who would travel to the village every weekend throughout the entire year. Now, he said, he doesn’t see many of his customers the whole winter. And if a person drives around the village at night, they will likely find a lot of dark houses and streets.

“The people buying don’t come out like they used to,” Mr. Schmidt said. “We used to have a lot of people who would rent from Memorial Day through Labor Day. That was a big deal. Sometimes the women, or the wives, would be out here all week long, and the husbands would join them on the weekends. But there were at least people out here.”

People just don’t rent for that time period anymore, he said, suggesting times have changed.

As the population dwindled, so did his business. On top of that, his staple location in the village suffered significant damage in 2016, when a basement fire burned through the floor. It was a setback Mr. Schmidt was not prepared for, as the fire occurred just weeks before Memorial Day weekend — the start of the busiest season.

“We’re okay,” he said. “We caught up last winter with the bills that weren’t covered by our insurance. It’s a lot tougher this winter, in particular. For some reason, this is a really rough winter for everyone in retail.”

Mr. Schmidt said business really dropped off the day after Christmas, and he speculates it was because school kids had a 16-day break, which gave families incentive to leave the area. It was a holiday week that he typically banks on as a bump to help get through January and February, when the business is slow.

At one time, Mr. Schmidt owned three stores: one in Southold, one in North Sea, and one in Southampton Village. In 2018, he closed the Southold location and sold the business portion of his seafood market in North Sea. Now, the property in North Sea is on the market for $2.2 million.

For the past couple of years, rumors have circulated that Mr. Schmidt was planning to sell the business in the village — and each time he adamantly denied that any deals were in the works, because he loves the business too much.

“I love the people,” he said. “I love the customers that I have. I enjoy talking to them and being up front and dealing with them.”