The owners of El Rey grocery stores faced an unintended competitor when they constructed a massive $5.5 million store at 916 S. Cesar Chavez Drive: themselves. They had planned on closing their cramped old location down the street once the new one, the largest Hispanic supermarket in the city, opened this spring, but business has been so strong at both storefronts that it now looks like they’ll coexist.
Not that Olivia Villarreal, who coowns El Rey with her husband, Ernesto, and his brother and his brother’s wife, is complaining. Since stumbling into the business almost 30 years ago, she’s seen the company thrive, and aside from the subsequent influx of paper work, she couldn’t be happier about the success.
When you opened the new location, you talked about closing the old one, right? And that was always the plan! This was always going to be the replacement for the old one. That building across the street is over 150 years old. I mean, how much patching can you do? [Laughs] Now instead of saying, “close down, knock down,” it’s going to be “repair, repair, repair.”
So there are still customers who just stubbornly refuse to adapt to the new location? Yes! [Laughs] They’re like, “Bah Humbug! I hate change, so stop it! I like shopping here! I like hitting everybody around with my cart!”
You took out a $2.2 million loan from the city for the new storefront. Were you nervous taking on that big of a loan? Oh! Are you kidding me? We’re very much from the old country mentality that if you don’t have it in your pocket, you don’t spend it. So this was going out on a limb. We were very nervous.
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Had you taken out loans for the previous locations? We had. The original loan for the original store was $150,000, and to us that was a lot of money. We’d never done anything on this scale. So this was a huge adventure. We didn’t realize how much it costs to build these days. It’s just amazing what brick and mortar costs these days.
You’ve been working at the business for almost 30 years now. How long are you planning to keep going for? It’s been 30 years, but you know, we have children in their 20s and 30s, and they’re quite active in this. So we’re fortunate that they like working here, and so we’re hoping that in a couple of years, Ernesto and I and his brother and his wife can retire, and the kids can make plans to continue.
So what’ll you do when you retire? Oh, we’re never really going to retire! [Laughs] We’re not going to spend all our time here, but we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves if we weren’t here.
I imagine it’d be a satisfying job, since you get to know just about everyone in the neighborhood. It is! The hardest part is sitting in our offices doing administrative stuff. The fun part is being downstairs talking to people. That is so much fun: hearing about people’s lives, hearing about their families. Ernesto, for example, on Saturdays, that’s all he does. He’s just downstairs, in the store with the people, talking to them and catching up on their families. His Saturday is his life. He works for Saturdays.
And what about you? I love doing that, too, and during the day sometimes, I’ll go and talk to customers, but I’m so bogged down with administrative workit’s terrible!
How did you end up being the one stuck with all that office work? You know what? Everyone stepped back and I didn’t realize that I was left in the front [laughs]. I don’t pay attention well!
