Sometimes you just want a bigger sign.
Steve Coram, founder and owner of Chilly’s Discount Liquor in Greenfield, IN, was not pleased with the smaller size of his sign out front in the strip mall where his business operates.
“People would tell me that they drove past the store by accident,” he recalls with a laugh.
Larger signage was a motivating factor to ask his landlord about expanding Chilly’s, then 4,500 square feet, into the space next door. In 2022, Coram did just that, growing his beverage alcohol retail location into 12,000 total square feet.
It’s an impressive trajectory for a shop that opened in 1996 in the same lot in a 1,500-sqaure-foot spot. Chilly’s moved across the lot in 2017 and then nearly tripled its size two years ago. How does Coram fill all that space?
Two separate tasting bars have helped, and he made more room for shopping carts. “It used to be a tight space,” Coram remembers. Looking to help fill out the enlarged space, he fondly recalled trips to a Brookstone store in a mall. “So I got a massage chair into the store,” he says.
This has proven popular for customers, as has Chilly’s putting green and basketball shooting game. Further enticing customers to enter the newly expanded side of the store, Coram moved the store’s massive whiskey section over there.
Wisely, Coram has kept the two different addresses for the combined space, with an eye towards future retail opportunities. “I did it in case I want to start a cannabis store,” he explains. Recreational marijuana remains illegal in Indiana, but Coram keeps an eye on proposed legislation. Any law passed will assuredly require separate addresses/locations for liquor and cannabis licenses.
The current retail space includes a garage door and loading dock in the back, as the former renter was a hardware store. “Deliveries come in so much easier now,” Coram says.
Doing Business Today
In 2024, some years removed now from the Covid-19 retail boom, “business has been solid,” Coram observes. “We’re never going back to the Covid years, but our sales jumped and then never come down. Now, a lot of that has to do with the expansion, but we’re seeing +5% to +7% constantly, and in all categories.”
One gage of good business that Coram monitors closely is customer count.
“Yesterday, for example, we had 364 customers. Last year on this date, we had 320,” he explains. “I don’t worry when the economy gets bad, because people just trade down. And so long as the customer count is still good, then I just got to ride the wave.”
“Now, if the customer count is not good, then I got to look at my competition and my prices,” he continues. “And I need to talk to customers. For instance, I had to fire one employee because I found out from talking with a customer that the employee had been rude to him.”
Hiring staff has become harder recently because the Greenfield economy has picked up.
“They opened up a Chick Filet, a Starbucks and an Olive Garden,” Coram says. “Part-time jobs were going over to those businesses, so I had to increase our payroll a little bit.”
Coram discovered that some potential hires hesitated to work at Chilly’s because the law required that they spend $45 on a personal license to sell alcohol. So Coram began buying the licenses himself for new staff.
Back during the pandemic, Chilly’s was one of countless stores that shortened their hours. “We’ve never gone back on our hours after Covid,” Coram says. “We were 9 to 11 in the past. Now we close at 10. That gives employees time to get home, watch the news, go to bed.”
“All the hotels and bars are on the other side of town, while we’re closer to the neighborhoods, so nobody near is staying up late,” he adds. “Everyone in our strip mall now tries to close around 10. It hasn’t hurt our business at all.”
Working as a Family
Chilly’s is a true family business. Each day at work, Coram is joined by his children Matt and Abbey.
“Working with my kids is great. It’s really rewarding,” he says. “I learn from them. I missed the computer age. When my kids came along, I was advertising in newspapers and billboards. Matt said that I may as well throw that money on the floor. He helped me change our marketing. Now when I put something on Facebook or Instagram, it sells out in an hour.”
“Both kids worked somewhere else before here and then came back to the business,” he adds. “I didn’t pressure either of them to work here but they both seem to love it.
How does a father balance a successful workplace environment with his son and daughter?
“The two kids are VPs in equal roles,” he says, adding with a laugh: “And when I sell the store to them, I’ll keep a 10% ownership to help settle things.”
Visit Chilly’s and you may also run into Coram’s father.
“My father is great. He retired and got bored and so I have him coming in to work the door as a greeter several days a week,” Coram says. “And this way he gets to see his grandkids throughout the week.”
The Coram clan certainly have a shared sense of humor and big personalities. To wit: One day while Coram’s father was working the door, a local police captain came in to pick up alcohol for a department function. Coram did not miss the opportunity for a joke.
“I told one of my customers that the cop was here for my father,” he recalls with a laugh. “I said that someone was mouthy to my father and my father tossed this guy on the ground, and I had to call the cop on my dad. And the customer believed me!”
It’s part of a genuine family atmosphere that helps uplift the store. How do Coram’s kids feel about this business arrangement?
“It’s good,” says Matt. “It’s a unique challenge, as well. Dad has been in the industry since 1982. He was on the distributor side for 16 years. That offers him a unique perspective. I’m more headstrong and he definitely reigns me in, because he’s seen so much more in the industry.”
“Sometimes it’s super fun, and sometimes it’s challenging,” adds Abbey. “I’ve worked for other people. It’s different. When you and your family own your own business, you can scramble more. If there’s a family emergency, it’s an emergency for all of us. It’s helpful that we own a bigger store. That way we’re not all on top of each other but can have our own space.”
As with any family business, the question of succession is inevitable.
“Dad is going to slow down soon and that means we will be taking a bigger role and co-leading the place,” says Matt.
“There are going to be pros and cons,” says Abbey. “Having [dad] around right now, knowing everything that he knows about the business, it’ll be different when he’s gone. It’s going to be different thinking, ‘Should we do this or that?’”
“We’ll still discuss what we should do with him, still ask for his opinions of course,” she adds. “We know that he’s not going to abandon us and leave us high and dry.”
Cold Advantage
Indiana has unique beer retail laws. While grocers, convenience stores and pharmacies are all allowed to sell beer, they cannot offer these products cold. They can only sell them warm.
Off-premise businesses (including breweries) can retail beer cold, however. This provides a significant advantage for liquor stores like Chilly’s. So much so that you’ll notice it referenced fairly discreetly in the business branding — and in the store layout. Coram credits his son Matt with the idea to install a 500-foot, walk-in “beer cave” in the store.
“It’s 19 degrees in there,” Coram says. “We have the coldest beer in town. If anyone else tries to say they have the coldest beer, I just point to our freezer temperature.”
This massive walk-in freezer also helps with employee retention.
“Their job is no longer as physical,” Coram explains. Rather than breaking down palates of beer for the coolers, Chilly’s staff can simply direct distributors to wheel deliveries into the huge freezer and plop them down there.
Coolers do remain important at Chilly’s, of course: the business boasts 36 doors full of cold products.
As elsewhere in the country, canned cocktails remain a big trend at Chilly’s, and another opportunity for an differentiation.
“We have a huge RTD selection here, so I added some more coolers for it,” Coram explains. “Our RTDs outgrew our beer cave, so I had to buy more coolers.”
Coram’s kids see canned cocktails similarly.
“RTDs are on fire,” Matt observes. “They’re doing very well.”
“A lot of women are buying RTDs,” says Abbey. “Women of all ages. Especially the RTDs that have alcohol in them instead of malt. These are great if you’re tailgating and don’t want to bring all your mixers to make cocktails. You can just toss them in a cooler and then consume them later as is. And a lot of these RTDs are only 100 calories, and they taste really good. You really know what you’re getting from them now.”
Tapping into Other Trends
Beyond RTDs and cold beer, Coram remains perceptive of other top trends in his store and market. For instance, American whiskey nationwide has cooled off from Covid highs, plateauing or receding in sales after recent boom years. But at Chilly’s?
“We’re a huge bourbon store and our bourbon has not leveled off,” Coram reports. Why? “We’re so close to Kentucky,” he says. “People are coming through on their way to the Bourbon Trail.”
Chilly’s sees whiskey tourists traveling from next-door Ohio, a state known for its famously generous Weller allocations. But not all Buffalo Trace products are so readily available over there, which has Ohioans making a drive. “We get more Buffalo Trace and Blanton’s versus Ohio, which doesn’t get as much of those bottles,” Coram says.
Like other whiskey retailers, Chilly’s has seen a recent shift for store pick single barrels. “It’s definitely slowed down,” Coram says. “The market has become saturated with picks. So many barrel clubs are doing them now. We still do them, but picks just aren’t unique anymore.”
“We were doing 10 to 12 picks per year just on our own,” he adds, “but now we’re down to five per year on our own, and ten more split with our co-op group.”
Chilly’s first joined their co-op 25 years ago. This setup gives a combined 55 or so independently owned stores significantly greater buying power. “We meet on Thursdays, and we buy together,” Coram says. “We buy in bulk size that we wouldn’t be able to afford or have the space for otherwise. It gives us the ability to compete with everyone in the market.”
Handling allocated whiskeys remains a tricky task. One way Chilly’s moves these bottles out of the backroom, while angering the fewest number of people, is through several local charity events. These include raffles and silent auctions for coveted releases, as well as whiskey tastings. Even people who missed out on Pappy cannot feel too mad when they had equal opportunity to snag the bottle, while money raised from the events benefits Meals on Wheels and the local VFW.
“I used to list how many of what bottles were available at these events, but smaller accounts started to get jealous of our allocations,” Coram says. “Now I just list what brands could be available,” without giving numbers.
Tequila has also ticked up at Chilly’s, matching overall U.S. trends. As for craft beer, which has seen better days nationally, “it’s still doing well here,” Coram says. “These days there are winners and losers, but the strong brands are doing well.”
Customer Service
Any decent independent beverage alcohol retailer knows that customer service is key. “We’re never going to beat Total or grocery on price,” Coram says. “We got to beat them on customer service.”
“That’s why we walk stuff out to cars,” he adds. “It’s why we hand sell things, and do charity events. People want human interactions.”
“There’s no human interactions at these bigger places,” Coram continues. “You can’t sustain grown based on process when you’re competing with these places. You’ve got to provide something that they don’t.”
Kyle Swartz is editor of Beverage Dynamics. Reach him at kswartz@epgmediallc.com. Read his recent piece, Wine Cellar Celebrates 50 Years of Success.
