described the fraud as “more of a small business entrepreneurial mistake.” He said that while his father was serving 44 months of a 52-month sentence in a federal prison in McKean, Pa., he lectured retailers about his mistakes in nearby Bradford. In a phone interview on Thursday, Stewart Jr. Leonard, leaning on a metal cane after hip surgery, said, sobbing: “I’ve hurt my family. Many of his devoted patrons who were interviewed afterward seemed more saddened or disappointed than angry. Three years later, he was sentenced to prison after pleading guilty to tax fraud for skimming more than $17 million in sales from the Norwalk store at the time, it was the nation’s largest computer-driven tax evasion case on record.

Leonard retired around 1990, but remained chairman emeritus of the company’s board. In 2015, Business Insider praised Kroger’s customer loyalty program and Wegmans’s walk-in beer locker, but it concluded that anyone who had ever set foot in Stew Leonard’s “knows it is miles above the rest.” “You’d have to own a cow to get it sooner,” his advertisements proclaimed.īryan Miller described it in The New York Times as the “Disneyland of Dairy Stores” “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” called it the “World’s Largest Dairy Store” and it earned a place in the Guinness World Records for having the highest dollar sales per square foot of selling space.

Leonard opened his original store in Norwalk, Conn., in 1969 as a destination that promised fresh milk because it was built around a bottling plant. The cause was complications of pneumonia, his son Stewart Jr. Stew Leonard Sr., a folkloric retailer who expanded his namesake stores into merchandising meccas replete with petting zoos and mechanical singing farm animals, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Manhattan.

Dead Connection by Charlie Price