WAMC spoke with Shelly and Barry Blyden, who help run the family business, Gary’s Pickles out of New Paltz, about the impact of high gas prices on their business.
Read the full transcript below:
Guerra: Can you talk to me about some of the types of pickles you have?
Shelly: Half bread and butter pickle chips. Bread and butter, traditionally are sugar and vinegar. On these I add fresh horseradish. I buy the root, grind it up and put it in myself. These are bread and butter, sugar and vinegar. Same thing without the horseradish. That’s half sour. It tastes like a garlicky, crunchy cucumber. Hot and spicy: I take the half sour and add crushed hot pepper to it. And this is a full sour, which has a lot of garlic and a lot of onions.
Guerra: So I was asking this gentleman right here--
Shelly: That's my husband.
Guerra: I was asking him about how farmers and small businesses are doing and what they would like to see out of like politicians or elected officials in order to like help small businesses.
Shelly: Well, during COVID we had the grants and those really helped. That helped get us through a lot of, you know, the struggles. But right now, just bring down those gas prices because that's everything. You know, we're paying almost half again as much because of transportation costs. I mean a cucumber is a cucumber. Unless we get a frost in the middle of spring, our cucumbers are gonna cost about the same. But getting them from one place to another. Too much.
Guerra: And I imagine there must be like a little bit of flexibility in terms of like your margins just because it's not like doesn't have to be like fresh fresh?
Shelly: Correct. But it also takes time. So, we're what we make today, we're gonna be selling in six weeks. So, we have to decide whether people are gonna come out and spend their money or not. Or else we get a lot of products. And pickles though they last, they don't last forever. Cause we do no pasteurizing with our pickles. They're salt cured so they don't need to be pasteurized.
Guerra: You were mentioning the grants during COVID. Like, do you feel like direct cash is like--
Shelly: That doesn't work. Just giving people cash doesn't work because they're gonna spend it on things that are like, ‘Wow, look, I've got an extra twenty dollars of cash, I'm gonna go out to get something to eat’, as opposed to, ‘Hey, I got an extra four hundred dollars that I can fix my refrigerator with’.
You know, business is a little different because we have our business plans. We budget out how much it's gonna cost to do what we need to do. Payroll is always an issue because people don't want to work for less and we can't afford to pay that much more.
So, you know, we are really lucky because we have great kids that work for us and we've known them since growing up. I get them from church, you know, so it's kind of their obligation. You know, community service, work for the small businesses. You can cut that out too. My church is gonna go, ‘What!’ But no, so you know that the kids who work for us are willing to take a little bit less because they get to eat all the pickles they want.
Guerra: Can I ask, have you had to raise the prices at all since like since the war in Iran or recently?
Barry: No, I would not feel comfortable charging more.
I personally hope the Democrats win and I hope they impeach Trump right away. I mean cucumbers have to get shipped to me and shipping prices have just gone up and how much are people willing to spend for pickles, you know. At a point it's just gonna price me out of business.
Without him they can hopefully stop the war in Iran. I mean they're not really doing much over there. Yeah, we don't want them to have nukes, but everybody else in the world's got ‘em. Eventually they're gonna them get one way or another, you know. So hopefull they'll pull out of there and fuel and oil will start going out of Iran and prices will start to come down. So, we're trying to make do the best we can.
This is our busiest time of the year, so hopefully things will change after the midterms. We can do the best we can, that's all. I'm not getting rich off of it. I've been doing it for forty-five years, I'm still not rich. So, you know, I'm still working, my son's working. It's a family business.
