Storeowner Jeff Calista proudly points to a new Waterford Crystal goblet with the $30 price tag. That’s probably 50 percent off what you’d pay for it at a high-end retailer, he says.
Elsewhere on his sales floor, Calista notes some expensive-looking wristwatches still in the packaging. None is priced at more than $100 – as much as 30 percent lower than you’d find at another store, he adds.
Calista operates A Little Bit of Everything, a Pawtucket store that certainly lives up to its name. In addition to crystal sets and watches, A Little Bit of Everything has boxed and canned foods, name-brand jeans and dress shirts, office supplies and even a $500 marble-top kitchen vanity. It’s all brand new.
Next week, there will be something different.
The thing that most of the inventory in the store has in common: No other retailer wanted it.
A Little Bit of Everything is a discount outlet that sells closeouts, out-of-season and end-of-run stock, floor models, returns or goods with damaged packaging. Think Building 19 or Ocean State Job Lot, except smaller.
And Calista has not only endured competition – both Ocean State Job Lot and Building 19 have locations in Pawtucket – he has thrived. And he credits the two discount powerhouses with some of that success.
He likens having those stores close by to competing car dealerships located across the street from one another. It draws in more customers.
Because of his store’s size – about 9,000 square feet and about $1.8 million in sales last year – Calista can accept batches of closeouts and out-of-season goods that would be too small for the bigger discount stores to bid on.
To find inventory, Calista attends auctions and cultivates relationships with manufacturers and distributors, and some fellow retailers.
No lot is too big for Calista, either. What he is unable to use, he unloads at wholesale prices to similar stores elsewhere in the country. The biggest factor determining whether Calista buys a batch of goods: the price.
“Well-bought is half sold,” he said with a smile.
A former Pawtucket liquor store owner, Calista actually stumbled into this business in the early 1990s when he was bought out of the liquor store and started selling leftover items from the store at a Massachusetts flea market.
By 1994, he was doing well enough to open his first store in Quincy, Mass., called Thrift, Groceries and More. Six years later, he opened A Little Bit of Everything in a 1,200-square-foot store on Armistice Boulevard. The store has moved twice since then to accommodate its growth.
Two years ago, Calista moved to a 9,000-sqare-foot former newspaper distribution center on Cottage Street.
Once recent morning, shoppers crowd the food aisle, which featured items such as cereal that had damaged packaging and bags of flour that Calista had purchased at a cut rate when the order was refused by the retailer it was initially intended for.
As he moves through the store, Calista seems to know a lot of his customers, trading jokes with people. “We’ve got customers who come in on a daily basis, or once a week, to see what we have,” he explained.
And the customer base is not limited to those who can’t afford to shop at higher-end stores. “Everybody loves a bargain,” he said.
His focus on the personal touch extends to the businesspeople from which he buys his inventory. Calista insists on driving his truck to all pickups because he says those relationships are too important to the business to leave in the hands of other employees.
Calista says sales have remained strong through the economic downturn, but customers have altered their buying habits, purchasing more the necessities such as food and clothes. And he has shifted his offering to match that demand.
He does take his chances in purchasing some goods. Once, a company unloaded a dump truck full of costume jewelry in the parking lot before negotiating a price. Calista worked out a deal. “That jewelry was still selling four years later,” he said.
He has been burned, too.
A few years ago, he purchased four trailers of paint, but when he put in on the sales floor it wouldn’t sell. He donated it to charities in Haiti.
He’s not concerned about the demand for the Waterford Crystal. Eventually, he insists, they will sell. “When Christmas comes,” he said. •
COMPANY PROFILE
A Little Bit of Everything
OWNERS: Jeff and Linda Calista
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Discount store
LOCATION: 340 Cottage St., Pawtucket
EMPLOYEES: 10
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 1994 as Thrift,
Groceries and More
ANNUAL SALES: $1.7 to $1.8 million
in 2009
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