Jack “Trip” Straub III said his family learned an important lesson more than a decade ago when it tried to expand its upscale grocery chain farther to the west.

In December 2008, Straub’s Fine Grocers opened a new store in Ellisville, its first since 1966 and larger than the others in the Central West End, Webster Groves, Clayton and Town and Country. A deep economic recession gripped the country, but there was another factor why the store closed in less than a year, said Straub, the company’s president and CEO.

“We didn’t realize when we went out to Ellisville there were a lot of transplants — not St. Louisans who were born and grown here and knew what a Straub’s was. So you put a Straub’s out there in the big box world and they didn’t have the same connection of ‘Oh, my grandma shopped there. My parents shopped there, so I’m going to shop there,’’ said Straub, whose nickname is Trip because three is a triple.

Read the full article on the St. Louis Business Journal.