David Hoppe

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:: Bob Landman's business model

The Good Earth

By David Hoppe

Some people and places can become a valuable part of you without even seeming to try. Now that he's gone, I realize that Bob Landman was like that for me. Bob was proprietor of the Good Earth Natural Food Store in Broad Ripple. He passed away on Dec. 6, a Saturday night, at the age of 62.

I can walk to the Good Earth from where I live. I've shopped there for 20 years. Despite that, I can't say I really knew Bob. He read this column from time to time and was generous enough to say so if we bumped into each other in one of his store's narrow passageways. But, mainly, he was a friendly, helpful presence. Whenever I saw Bob, it seemed he was helping someone find a pair of shoes that fit, or the right vitamin supplement, or the freshest, greatest tasting apple.

Much, quite rightly, has been made of Bob's prescience in getting in on the ground floor of the healthy foods business in the early 1970s. Those were the days when "health food store" had a counter cultural ring to it. Rather than futuristic, these emporiums usually had a handmade, frontier feel about them. This reflected the larger ethos of the counter culture that, contrary to the let-it-all-hang-out stereotypes propounded by mainstream media, was actually conservative in the truest sense. Conservative, that is, in wanting to keep alive such supposedly traditional American values as fair dealing, respect for authenticity, and the preservation of local cultural identity.

These are the values, of course, most endangered in a country where a premium is placed on being big, where it's said you must grow or die, and where success is defined as market domination. And so, as the Good Earth went from being the only store of its kind around here to little guy in a sea of heavily capitalized franchises from other parts of the country, those of us who patronized the place found ourselves flinching. We worried that Wild Oats would be too big, or that Sunflower would be too close. We saw neighborhood hardware stores and drug stores disappearing and we feared the Good Earth might be overtaken as well.

But the Good Earth has survived because Bob Landman and the team of individuals who make up the Good Earth family stuck to their core principles. Yes, it's true that Landman and crew were on to the next big thing when they hitched their wagon to organic products and local foods - what, in business parlance could be called an emerging trend. But if that was all they had going for them, the Good Earth would have been swamped by the competition long ago.

"Our marketing strategy has always been to just offer the best possible prices on everything all the time," Landman told the Indianapolis Business Journal in 1999, trying his best to speak in terms the readers of that publication might understand. I'd like to think there was a larger message embedded in that statement. Something about what I think Bob understood about the relationship any business needs to have with the community where it lives.

A community, in other words, isn't just a market to be exploited. It's a web of relationships. A problem for business is that as it gets bigger, it also finds nourishing certain kinds of community relationships more difficult. It becomes more impersonal. At this point, such businesses try various marketing ploys to make it seem like they "care." Meanwhile, their rage for growth continues.

The Good Earth is not a service organization. Bob Landman needed to make a profit. But his idea of growth seemed founded not on the sheer number, but the quality of the relationships he could cultivate. And so the Good Earth held its ground, made adjustments as required, but never wavered from its (counter) cultural principles.

I wonder if Bob paid attention to economic theory in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. In that country, they don't measure the Gross Domestic Product. Instead, since 1972, they have developed a way to gauge their prosperity based on what they call Gross National Happiness (GNH). For GNH to grow, the Bhutanese focus on four key areas: the promotion of equitable and sustainable socio-economic development; preservation and promotion of cultural values; conservation of the environment; and good government. "Happiness is very serious business," according to Bhutan's Prime Minister, Jigme Thinley. "The dogma of limitless productivity and growth in a finite world is unsustainable and unfair for future generations."

With the possible exception of that serious part, I suspect Bob Landman would have known exactly what the prime minister is talking about. Sustainable happiness was Bob's business model.