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Barry Adkin, owner of Howard’s Market in Boca Raton, was hoping to move to

Manalapan’s Plaza del Mar before the plaza began negotiating with Publix.

Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

Related story: Code change accommodates Publix sign request

By Dan Moffett

    For 30 years, Barry Adkin has helped run Howard’s Market, the family business on Southwest 18th Street in Boca Raton.
    That means rising around 5 each morning, cooking up casseroles and deli foods, getting the books to add up through good economies and bad, opening up ASAP after hurricanes, managing 40 employees and making emergency deliveries to loyal customers when unexpected guests show up for dinner.
    “We’re a small-town market,” Adkin says. “If you forget your money when you come to our store, just sign the bill. You can pay us the next time. We care about serving our community.”
    He was riding his bike through Manalapan about a year ago when the idea struck him: The town’s Plaza del Mar would be an ideal location for another Howard’s Market, a fitting extension of the eponymous enterprise his late father, Howard “Pops” Adkin Sr., founded in 1985.
    Barry Adkin, 50, didn’t know it at the time but he was about to pedal his way into a Howard and Goliath melodrama that was more biblical than any small businessman would ever want.
    Within weeks of the ride, Adkin was talking with Kitson & Partners, the plaza’s landlord. He offered a plan to put a 13,000-square-foot store in the centrally located building where two other small groceries had failed.
    Adkin brought in an engineer and drew up plans that included solar panels. “We want to do what’s right for the environment,” he said.
    Prospects for a deal with Kitson seemed promising, according to Adkin, and then a corporate giant entered the picture: Publix, the Lakeland-based supermarket chain with some 1,100 stores, 180,000 employees and annual revenues of roughly $33 billion.
    “We went from first in line to second in line very quickly,” Adkin said.
    Now Publix and Kitson are negotiating terms of a deal that would put a 26,000-square-foot supermarket in the plaza, town officials say, with construction beginning early next year and an opening set for 2018. Both Publix and Kitson declined requests to comment for this story.
    Town commissioners find themselves caught somewhere in the middle of the sticky grocery drama. They have no authority to get involved in negotiations between Kitson and a prospective tenant.
    But they have plenty of authority to dictate the building codes, permitting requirements and operational rules that regulate a large business in their town.
    “The owners of the shopping center are certainly well within their rights to bring a major grocery store in there,” Mayor David Cheifetz said, “and there’s a limit to what we can do as a commission.”
    Town Attorney Keith Davis said the town has to stay out of the landlord’s contractual relationships: “We have no business getting into whether it’s a Publix, Winn-Dixie or some other, smaller grocery store.”

Is Publix too big?
     In May, town commissioners approved a change to their sign ordinance that would allow Publix to display a large version of the company logo. About a month ago, Cheifetz visited Howard’s Market in Boca, as commissioners wrestled with worries that Publix might be too big for their town and plaza.
     “The entire concept of allowing that (large) store basically is going to push out other tenants with that structure,” said Commissioner Ronald Barsanti. “You’re losing the flavor of that plaza by pushing out restaurants. The jewelry store is going to have to move. A number of people are going to leave and we’re going to have this big monolith there.”
    Pedro Maldonado, owner of Jewelry Artisans Inc., says the landlord has given him until Sept. 30 to vacate the store he’s occupied for 27 years. “Right now, I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Maldonado said.
    Former Vice Mayor Robert Evans, who lives adjacent to the plaza at La Coquille Villas, told the commission it should consider Howard’s Market as an option that might fit Manalapan better than Publix.
    “Now we know that there are alternatives and that the market is viable, we don’t have to trade our character for convenience,” Evans said. “It’s not just about La Coquille. It’s about the entrance to our town and what people see when they enter our town.”
John Lawson owns Stepping Out Shoe Salon in the plaza. His store will not be uprooted by the Publix plan.
    “Barry’s a nice guy and I like him as a small businessman,” Lawson said. “But I’m for whatever brings more traffic and makes the center more lively. We desperately need an anchor. We need a place where somebody on Ocean Boulevard can roll out of bed in the morning and go buy a bottle of milk. I’m for whoever can bring that, and unfortunately for Barry it looks like it will be somebody else.”
     Adkin, with his older brother and business partner Howard Jr., believe their store’s three-decade track record speaks for itself and shows the town stability that the previous small grocers lacked.
    “We have three employees who have been with us 20-plus years because we’re a family company,” he said. “When they have hard times, we take care of them.”
    Howard’s also brings special services to the table, he says. Last Thanksgiving, the Adkins cooked 150 whole turkeys and 200 breasts for Boca customers, a tradition that Howard Sr. started.
    Bringing a store to Manalapan would be a fitting way to extend the legacy of the father and small businessman who died six years ago.
    “Our holidays have always been when you have no holidays,” Adkin said.
    “My dad and I cooked together every year on Thanksgiving and Christmas. What else could a father and son want than to spend every holiday together?”