Want to buy a bak­ery? Lucy’s Sweet Surrender’s run com­ing to an end

SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio — Even if the scores of cook­ie jars lin­ing the shelves in Lucy’s Sweet Sur­ren­der were over­flow­ing with cash, Michael Feigen­baum prob­a­bly would still have to close his bakery.

Feigen­baum has owned the busi­ness for 26 years. He moved it from the Buck­eye-Shak­er neigh­bor­hood to its cur­rent loca­tion on Cha­grin Boule­vard just west of War­rensville Cen­ter Road a decade ago. It’s locat­ed in the for­mer Chan­dler & Rudd space, a 145-year-old spe­cial­ty gro­cer that had been in the spot since 1960.

But the end of the bak­ery, as he sees it, is com­ing soon. It’s not coro­n­avirus, it’s not poor financ­ing or mount­ing debt, it’s not issues over a lease.

It’s Feigen­baum’s inabil­i­ty to find some­one who wants to take over.

“My num­ber-one goal was to find peo­ple like I was 25 years ago who want to own a bak­ery,” he said. “Instead of start­ing from scratch, they can start with a sub­stan­tial amount of mon­ey com­ing in the door, a huge rep­u­ta­tion, income streams from online ship­ping, deliv­ery around Cleve­land, the farm­ers mar­kets and the store.

“If they were even­tu­al­ly buy­ing me out com­plete­ly, yes, they would own every­thing — the recipes, the meth­ods, the name, the web­site — all of what I own I would give them.”

It would be a deal, he said, because a new own­er would­n’t have to invest $300,000 to $500,000 to start such a busi­ness from scratch. They could appren­tice to learn Lucy’s style as they tran­si­tioned into run­ning the place.

But that idea is prov­ing elu­sive because no mat­ter how hard Feigen­baum looks, prospec­tive bak­ers-busi­ness own­ers aren’t rush­ing in.

Last week, he post­ed an emo­tion­al Face­book plea born out of frus­tra­tion with not being able to find a future buyer.

I am seri­ous­ly look­ing at the end of this bak­ery next month we will be so short of help I will cut back even more than…Posted by lucy’s sweet sur­ren­der bak­ery on Fri­day, July 17, 2020

“I decid­ed to write that thing as a Hail Mary,” he said.

He remains on the look­out for poten­tial buy­ers. He has scoured culi­nary schools. He trav­eled to a pas­try school’s job fair in Chicago.

“They would­n’t move to Cleve­land,” he said. “I got noth­ing out of it. I spent two days there. I have been aggres­sive­ly look­ing behind the scenes.”

Envi­sion­ing the end start­ed last Christ­mas for Feigen­baum. He could bare­ly keep up with hol­i­day demand.

Feigen­baum, 66, has a back worn by the count­less hunch­es that come with knead­ing, rolling, cut­ting, shap­ing. But he kept plod­ding on.

“My wife and I had a heart-to-heart about ‘What are we going to do now?’ ” he said. They fig­ured they could han­dle the slow­er win­ter, Jan­u­ary through March, on their own, then gear up with some help for East­er and Passover.

“Some­how we’ll pull it off,” he said, “so we’ll have a boom­ing hol­i­day sea­son and then I’ll call the liquidator.”

Then coro­n­avirus hit. Liq­uida­tors backed off from any poten­tial sale.

“We stayed open,” he said, despite about $8,000 worth of East­er and Passover orders being canceled.

Then some­thing inter­est­ing hap­pened. Lucy’s neigh­bor­hood, once you get off Cha­grin Boule­vard, is heav­i­ly res­i­den­tial. When Feigen­baum moved into the spot he thought the res­i­dents would find him. For what­ev­er rea­son, they did­n’t, he said. But when the stay-at-home order hit, the res­i­dents sud­den­ly found his place as a brief respite, a quick stop on a walk to get out of the house.

That stream of busi­ness, albeit lim­it­ed, along with a fed­er­al Pay­check Pro­tec­tion Pro­gram loan, and the hire of two col­lege stu­dents who were home, helped the busi­ness “eek along.”

Now the pair of stu­dents are leav­ing. He’s weath­ered two major reces­sions, ⁹⁄₁₁ and the pan­dem­ic. He’s had a steady, neigh­bor­hood busi­ness. He deliv­ers to farm­ers mar­kets and has craft­ed desserts for restau­rants. But what he does­n’t have is a farm sys­tem of prospec­tive bak­ers, a pool of tal­ent to choose from, some­one to run the busi­ness that he admits “is a lot of hard work, and you’re inher­it­ing a her­itage and a legacy.”

“It’s always been good but not great. It’s nev­er been bad where I go ‘I’ve got to go out of busi­ness because I don’t make enough mon­ey,’ ” he said.

The bot­tom line, he said, is that he has “come to the con­clu­sion that I’m not will­ing to keep going any­more. We’re fac­ing a Rosh Hashanah sea­son in Sep­tem­ber where we have to make 800 or 1,000 loaves of bread in three days with no help. And I’m not going to do it.”

Phys­i­cal­ly, the demand of bak­ing for 40 years has tak­en its toll for the Shak­er Heights High School grad­u­ate who grew up on Lytle Road a block from the bakery.

Fruit Dan­ish­es, choco­late-chip cook­ies, glazed dough­nuts and oth­er good­ies fill the counter in Lucy’s, which cov­ers about 3,000 of the more than 5,000 square feet in the build­ing. Dozens of fresh­ly baked loaves cool in the kitchen. The cook­ie-jar col­lec­tion shapes the décor. But unless Feigen­baum finds some­one by mid-August, he is ready to put every­thing up for sale, from the oven to the utensils.

“There could be a last-minute Hail Mary answer,” he said, “and I’m ready to do it.”

But for now, as Feigen­baum says, “I’m fight­ing an uphill battle.”

Source: Marc Bona, cleve​land​.com