Time Stands Still at Balich 5 and 10
ARLINGTON, MA - Times are changing, but you'd never know it inside the Balich 5 and 10 store on Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington Heights. Led to this location by patriarch Antoun Balich in 1972, the Balich family has provided the neighborhood with a wonderland of household gadgets six days a week, every week, ever since.
Antoun (an-TUNE), a gruff but amiable man, still helps run the store three days a week, even after retiring ten years ago. Pride was evident in his deep and gravelly voice as he explained the history of the store, recently:
“We used to have a convenience store in Dorchester. Then I came here looking for a business and I found this one in the newspaper. I bought it in 1972.”
“I never work for nobody,” he added, when asked if the move enabled him to own his first business. “Dorchester had too much crime. Arlington is a great city.”
Even before Antoun assumed ownership, the store already had an old-fashioned charm. The site has been a five and dime store continuously since 1954. Antoun set out to preserve the original ambiance from the beginning: “We kept everything old. We don't want to change nothing. It's the same thing as before you were born. Everything here is seventy-five years old.”
While Antoun's arithmetic may be suspect, the charm of the store is genuine. Antoun's son Joe runs the store now, and like his father before him, he has kept everything just the way he found it.
Never quite clean-shaven below his black mustache, the dash of salt in Joe's perpetual stubble speaks quietly of the long hours he spends behind the counter. With few exceptions, he's there six days a week, every week, from open till close. He provides a friendly face familiar to anyone who frequents the shop.
Joe's favorite part of running the business is deciding what to buy and stock on the shelves. He explained: “There's a lot to choose from. I consider past history, advice from wholesalers, catalogues, and just my own imagination of what will sell and what won't sell. It's hard. I made a lot of mistakes, buying things that just don't sell. Sometimes you hit something good, and that makes up.”
Are there any hot sellers now? Joe considered the question. “Right now? Wow. That's a hard one.” Joe deferred to his father: “What's hot right now?”
“Everything,” Antoun replied.
Joe profiled his typical customer: “A lot of our shoppers are loyal customers who shop here first rather than waste time looking elsewhere. They ask me first. If I don't have it, chances are they can't find it anywhere else. Because chain stores, if they don't move an item reasonably well, they won't stock it. But I'll stock an item and it will sit on the shelf for ten years, and it won't bother me much.” Joe explained, “If I need space, I may look at the item and decide if I really want to keep it or put something else there.”
Joe confessed, “You know, there are a lot of things in the store that just don't sell.”
Are there any notable relics on the shelves now? Joe led an impromptu tour of the store and picked out a few antiques in the making. “This thing right here,” he said, pointing to one of a pair of Table Toppers Tea Pots. “I've had this for years, and I really don't know what the purpose of it is, quite honestly.”
“And this is very old: Toilet seat bumpers. People don't buy those any more. They just buy a new toilet seat. These have been here twenty, twenty-five years, at least.”
At the sight of toilet seat bumpers, I forgot about the interview. “I need new bumpers for my toilet seat,” I said. “I didn't know they sold them.”
“Remember these?” Joe said. He had moved on to a set of thumbnail-sized white plastic window wedges.
“Two fifty,” I said, gazing intently at the price of the toilet bumpers. These could really spruce up my apartment, I thought, for just a couple bucks.
“Remember these for rattling windows?” Joe said.
I awoke from my reverie and looked up again. “No,” I said.
“They sell a dollar ninety-eight for four.”
After we toured the store, Joe took me downstairs, where he keeps out-of-season merchandise. As crowded as the upstairs shelves are, they hold only half the inventory. The entire inventory adds up to roughly 40,000 different items. There is no exact count, because no list exists. Joe tracks the entire store in his head. “I probably know 95% of what we have in the store, off the top of my head, and where it is,” he said. With typical modesty, he added, “Every once in a while I have to walk around and reacquaint myself with what we have, believe it or not.”
Joe's remarkable familiarity with his inventory is evident even as he admits his mistakes: “There have been times that people asked me for something, and I was sure we didn't have it, and then I came across it. That happens, but not often.”
When Antoun bought the store back in 1972, Arlington alone had half a dozen different five and dime stores. Now there are just five hundred (give or take) across the entire country. What is the Balich family's secret to success? “Service,” Joe answered. “I service the heck out of the business. I go downstairs and get something off-season. Show customers how to use things. Go find things for them. Everything.”
Antoun is equally blunt in answering the same question: “We don't have to pay outside help. It's all in the family. Me, my wife, my children — all family affair. We don't have a big payroll or anything like that. We survived, and now all the competition is gone.”
Joe ran down the family roster. “My name is Joe. That's my father Antoun. Also, my mother Gloria works here. And my sister Joyce and brother Paul help out. And my sister Lydia, she helps too.”
A happy customer overheard our conversation. “It's all in the family,” she said as she smiled at us and walked out the door.
“No payroll here,” Antoun agreed.
“They all help out,” Joe added.
