There was never a day in 38 years when Paddy Fitzgerald woke up and didn’t want to go to work, and in his first few days after handing over the keys to The Seafood Shop in Churchill Square, he slung his briefcase over his shoulder as usual.
Until he reminded himself he doesn’t need to do that now.
“Thirty-eight years doing the same thing, turning the key in the same door, I was pretty lost there,” Fitzgerald said in an interview at a coffee shop near the St. John’s store.
“I am starting to come around now.”
After posing for photos outside the shop, Fitzgerald exchanged some kind words and some banter with longtime, twice-a-week customers Paul and Cathy O’Leary. There was some teasing about men’s fashion sense.
They reminisced about the old days of Churchill Square — teens decades ago playing minor football and softball in the park across the street and long-gone stores like Giant Mart.
And then Cathy O’Leary gave Fitzgerald a hug.
“We’d come in for the service of course,” said Paul.
“And the friendship,” said Cathy.
One time, when the shop was out of fish — a generic word in the rest of the world, but in these parts specifically referring to cod — Cathy said she bought her fish at a supermarket.
“It was the pits,” she said. “Once and once only.”
Walking away, Fitzgerald said that’s what he’ll miss — the daily interaction with his friends, as he’d come to look on regulars that way — not just as customers.
“The hardest part for me is not seeing the customers. That hurts the most,” he said.
His simple message to customers, as he leaves the career, is gratitude for their patronage.
“They made my day coming to the shop,” he said.
On May 31, he passed the keys to new owners M and A Fisheries, but stuck around the next day — a Friday — to help out, because he knew it would be busy.
Fitzgerald and his wife, Barbara, have three daughters — Sarah, Kate and Megan — but they all have their own careers and didn’t want to take over the store.
It all started in the early 1980s when his brother-in-law was working at the Fishery Products International (FPI) store in the Avalon Mall.
Around that time, Fitzgerald had an opportunity to train to be a prison guard at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary — he’d passed the first stages toward landing a job.
But he chose FPI instead. He had no background in the trade, but has learned everything since.
Fitzgerald grew up on Mount Scio Road and worked summers on the savoury farm there, and full time for a bit, and then tried his hand in the automotive sector.
He never expected retail would turn out to be his life’s career.
“If somebody said to me, ‘You’ll be 38 years working retail behind the counter,’ I would have said, ‘Man you are nuts,’” Fitzgerald said. “I just came off the savoury farm. I wanted to be in construction, wanted to be outdoors building houses, doing anything.”
Fitzgerald wouldn’t change a thing now.
“The fact that I can walk away now and know that I got all my bills paid — I don’t owe anyone anything and I have a little nest egg for myself — it makes me so happy and proud. It’s unbelievable. That to me is success,” he said.
At one time, FPI — which left the Avalon Mall for Churchill Square — had a store at the St. John’s airport, and in the K-Mart plaza on Topsail Road. For a couple of years, Fitzgerald was managing all three. The airport eventually decided it needed the space back and the Topsail Road store never did well, he said.
In 1997, FPI decided to get out of the storefront business and sold out. Fitzgerald was laid off, which allowed him to spend a year with his youngest daughter before she went off to school.
Then the new owner eventually decided the store wasn’t right for him, and Fitzgerald wanted it.
He and Barbara mortgaged their home and used some savings.
“God love her. She supported me 100 per cent. She never, ever second-guessed me, even when it meant dipping into the funds to keep things going,” Fitzgerald said. “It wasn’t all doom and gloom. There were only a couple years that were terrible.”
It was 10 years, though, before he paid himself a salary — his wife works for the federal government and he concentrated on making sure he could get through the slower periods of the year and any rainy day that might come.
This was one of his principles of business — never bank on the boom times rolling on, and overspend.
“We could have bought all kinds of toys and bells and whistles,” he said, noting those who do so — taking expensive trips, buying multiple homes, top-of-the-line trucks, quads and other luxuries, and living off credit cards — one day see things go sideways and can’t pay their bills.
In 20 years, they probably took only a couple of major family trips, he said.
The business bottom line grew by five or 10 per cent a year, but Fitzgerald also avoided expanding even when things were booming amid flush oil cash — preferring to keep it to one store and one set of overhead in case fish was hard to get or things slowed.
“There were days in that store in summertime we have moved 800 to 900 pounds of cod,” he said. “And there were days we only moved 100 to 200 pounds.”
Besides selling over the counter, the Seafood Shop supplies many restaurants, and packs out to mainland expatriates and for those from here who are travelling to visit family away.
Another of his rules of business is to never burn a bridge, and he said he always spread purchases around to different reliable buyers. Fitzgerald didn’t buy directly from fishermen, as he found it better to concentrate on the store and let the buyers pick out the best product for him.
It’s getting harder to source product, he said. Crab and lobster catches are down. Some days you can’t get fresh cod — there hadn’t been much around the past week when The Telegram spoke with Fitzgerald.
“This is a weather-generated business. There are long stretches of bad weather and you struggle to get what you are looking for,” he said.
Fitzgerald never bought more than a day or a day and a half worth of fresh product, in order to ensure customers got the freshest catch. He also didn’t buy pre-filleted, because cod, salmon and other fish are better if filleted as needed, he said.
“I always ran the business on two things — quality and service,” he said.
“Price wasn’t always a factor. People are willing to pay a little extra for a really good product.”
Fitzgerald said he was lucky with staff — in all those years, he had only four that he wished he didn’t hire. But, while he leaves behind good staff, it’s getting harder and harder to find dedicated employees, as students graduate or employees move on, he said.
Fitzgerald’s employees seem to love him, too.
Zack LeDrew has been working there part-time and summers the last few years while pursuing a university degree in computer science.
“Paddy has been really good to me,” LeDrew said, noting how his boss worked his schedule around his school hours.
“I’m sad. … You get used to someone, and they are not there.”
Mornings were started off with coffee and chat time as the staff got ready for a busy day. Fitzgerald was known to sing off key throughout the day. The running joke sometimes was that he needed a blue vest like a Wal-Mart greeter, as he’d welcome customers and warmly send them on their way.
Even though she has worked only a few weeks with Fitzgerald, Janene Powell noticed the way he had with customers.
She said she wished she knew that 10 years ago, and would have come to work for him.
“He’s amazing,” she said.
At 62, Fitzgerald isn’t talking retirement. He has a to-do list around his home of jobs that got delayed over the last 20 years, and may get into handyman work after a bit of a break, or a new adventure.
He also never got to golf much in the summer due to the busy time at the store, and used to have to wait for fall.
And he’d like to play catch-up on some travel with his wife. They’ll also continue to explore communities around the province, something they started years back. The west coast is next on the agenda, and Fitzgerald hopes to see some of the people he dealt with over the years in the fishery business, but never met face to face.
New owner Angus O’Connell — his business is named for his children, Michael and Angie — has also been in the business for decades.
He also owns Skipper’s Seafood Shop in Mount Pearl.
“Thirty-eight years from when I started was Friday (June 1), the same day I took over the Seafood Shop,” O’Connell said.
He agreed it is harder to get product, especially with government rules around the fishery changing all the time, but said he’s sure the fish retail business will endure.
Nothing much is going to change at the Churchill Square store, O’Connell said, especially customer service.
“The customer is everything. If you don’t have customers, you’re not in business,” he said.
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