Thursday, September 24, 2015

Fish or cut bait

This past year has been a very difficult one for the Burhop family. Illness caused the rather sudden retirement of our CEO (my husband) last September, and I had to take over many of his duties. I found that important things had fallen by the wayside in the management of the company, and that mistakes made years ago had come back to haunt us.
     After a lot of soul searching, a decision was made to close the Glenview store at the end of this month. There is a possibility that another seafood operation will take over from us, I will keep you posted.
      We have been in the Glen Oak shopping center for over 30 years, a long time. We wish it was going to be longer. I found out that we were paying the highest rent per square foot in the center, and we were paying retail rent for our wholesale space in the back, a giant drain on our bottom line.
      While the former owners of the shopping center were local, the current owners are a very large corporation. They were not willing to work with us on changing our lease - at least not until we told them that we were closing. Too little too late.
      We are incredibly grateful to our loyal staff, some who have worked for us for decades, and are very sad to see them go. We are also sad about letting down our many wonderful regular customers in Glenview - we will truly miss you. We just wish that there had been more of you.
      Our Hinsdale store will remain open, and we're looking into the possibility of providing delivery service to people in the northern suburbs who still want to get our incredible party trays, our famous cooked shrimp, and various oven-ready entrees, sauces and other prepared foods. Stay tuned.

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