Albertson’s Yogurt & Such owner Debra Foy has weathered two disasters – one natural, the other plumbing-related – in her first year operating the yogurt store franchise since September.
But Foy said she is not complaining.
“I seem to at least get a compliment from a customer every day, so as long as that keeps happening, I guess I’m doing alright,” she said.
Foy said good customer service and a diverse menu has helped her create a “lively business” in the past year.
In addition to frozen yogurt, the store offers wraps and sandwiches for lunch and since she has taken over has added breakfast meals, including egg waffles and homemade muffins. The store also contains a sushi bar, which leases space from her.
“I just really tried to improve on what was already here,” Foy said, “And I tried to focus on customer service.”
This includes free delivery for everything on the menu.
Foy said her experience with Yogurt & Such, which is located at 1018 Willis Ave. in a shopping center shared by Waldbaum’s and other stores, has been “very similar” to being a daytime manager in a Merrick deli for 13 years, where she worked before taking over the 25-year-old Albertson Yogurt & Such franchise.
The one difference she has noticed is the strain of being a business owner.
“That can be a tremendous stress,” she said.
The biggest source of strain for her was Hurricane Sandy, which struck just two months after she opened.
The store, Foy said, was without power for a week.
She said she had prepared for the storm by buying a generator the weekend before Sandy struck, which kept the store’s frozen yogurt frozen.
But then she ran out of fuel to run it.
“It was pretty crazy,” Foy said.
She said she slept in the store during the storm’s aftermath to make sure no one would walk off with the generator.
In the spring, she faced another challenge. An excess of the sugar used to make the yogurt had been poured into the store’s main sink and clogged the bottom of the drain.
Water from the frozen yogurt machines started spurting out of the sink “like a fountain,” she said.
“For an hour, I just sat there emptying buckets of water until my son got here with the pool pump,” Foy said.
She said her son, Ryan, left work to come to the rescue, bringing the pool pump from her house in Merrick.
Fortunately, she said, the mishap occurred early in the morning, so the store was in shape for lunchtime business.
In the winter, she said, business dipped a bit as expected with a store specializing in frozen yogurt. But she said she was ready for that.
Foy said she hopes to grow by continuing to advertise in local newspapers as well as finding new ways to promote the business.
She said she’s hoping to do fundraising events for local schools this year that will give the store additional exposure. And ,she said, she’s planning to expand her marketing into online social media to help draw a younger crowd to the store.
