McHenry County butcher shops still seeing more customers, sales as COVID-19 surges again

The Hub Market butcher shop and deli in McHenry will reopen this week, remodeled with a portion of its beverage bar removed and another 8-foot meat case added, a change made as the business focuses on the meat retail portion of its sales.

Owner Mandy Polerecky said that this year she increasingly found the meat retailing portion of her sales to be the cornerstone of the operation, and the COVID-19 pandemic was a big reason why.

Earlier this year, large grocery chains began suffering shortages of beef and other meat because of supply chain disruptions caused by the viral outbreak, which hit some of the nation’s big packing plants hard and slowed production.

When that happened, Polerecky and other McHenry County butcher shop owners experienced a notable uptick in the number of customers coming through their doors looking for their protein, she said.

“When everyone couldn’t find meat at the grocery stores and they were running out, we never had any problems getting it. We picked up a large chunk of customers that maybe may not have known about us,” Polerecky said.

While the big boost to local butcher shop sales came during the springtime, they have retained customers, converting them from buying meat at grocery chains and keeping them coming back.

Another boost has come from customers looking for alternatives to having meals out at steakhouses and restaurants since virus-related restrictions diminished their seating capacities and appeal, said Wendy Kotlowski, a daughter of the Kalck family that has run Kalck’s Butcher Shop in Crystal Lake for decades.

“I do believe that because people aren’t going out to eat so much, they are cooking at home. I feel our business has increased because of it,” Kotlowski said.

Like Hub Market, the Crystal Lake shop and at least two other McHenry County meat shops have seen a surge in demand and have adapted.

Kotlowski said she hadn’t expected the pandemic to be a boon when it invaded Illinois this year, and business has started to return to a more normal pace since the Thanksgiving holiday passed.

“I thought we would suffer,” Kotlowski said. “It’s always nice to see new faces and for them to keep coming back. We’ve been here for 46 years. You just never know what’s going to happen.”

Plus, some shoppers have been apprehensive about heading back into the large grocery stores that see far more daily foot traffic than smaller outlets. Hub Market has also worked to solve that problem for its customers, Polerecky said.

“We brought in eggs, lettuce, tomatoes, stuff we don’t normally sell to the public, so people can come in and get everything on their grocery list at one stop, without having to go into the big Walmarts, the Jewels. When the panic hit, everyone was forced to kind of find us,” Polerecky said.

Wayne’s Country Market in Marengo has seen more customers, too, and their demand for bulk beef purchases has risen during the pandemic, driving more sales than normal of quarter-steers and half-steers, rather than individual cuts, owner Rodger Brandt said.

“People were afraid of the shortage of meat, so we started buying beef from local farmers for halves and quarters. Customers wanted to offset the shortage. They were afraid the stores might not have the meat they want at the time,” Brandt said.

At Butcher on the Block in Lake in the Hills, business has continued booming this year since the spring peak, with sales up 63% over this time last year, owner Tom Yucuis said. As restaurants continue to experience government-ordered shutdowns of indoor dining, Butcher on the Block has sold meat to its eatery customers at cost, rather than profiting from such deals, he said.

Yucuis locked in orders for six months’ worth of meat in the spring before the meat shortages started impacting stores, he said, and did so again in August to get the store through the end of the year.

“My suppliers had no idea what I was doing and I didn’t tell them. Nobody knew it would get this bad,” Yucuis said. “The ironic thing is I’ve never, in the 20 years I’ve been in business, sold bleach, toilet paper, sanitizer, and we sold all of that. We had displays of it.

“We had lines down to the end of the block, all day every day,” he siad. “It was grueling. We had gone three months or better without anyone having a single day off. We did what we had to do because we were in the middle of a crisis situation.”