Jun 1, 2010

Home Grown: Jacksonville MercantileBy Greg StilesMailTribune.com

Oregon — Editor’s note: This is one in a weekly series of profiles on locally owned and operated businesses in Southern Oregon.

What do you do and how long have you been doing it?

(David speaking) We are a specialty and gourmet food shop focusing on a lot of hard-to-find food adventures, and we are also corporate and holiday gift basket specialists — custom baskets as well as pre-made. We opened the store five years ago, and it was our first foray into retail sales.

How long have you lived in the Rogue Valley?

It’ll be six years in August. We lived in Chicago until I was turning 40. We grew up in Illinois.

What inspired you to go into this line of work?

My wife, and our love of food and wine. We really found that much of our social life is having and going to dinner parties. Quite frankly, my wife is my muse in trying to create a less stressful business where people are happy 99.9 percent of the time. We moved here and this was not even on our radar screen; we had looked at bed and breakfasts, and restaurants and inns and such. This building just called out to me, and I said, “Let’s do this, it’ll be great,” and we did it.

What decision or action would you change if you could do it again?

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