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Allen & Son Barbeque: Keith Allen

Cliff's Meat Market: Cliff Collins

Mama Dip's Traditional Country Cooking: Mildred Council

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Interviews and photographs by Amy Evans.

Cliff Collins

Cliff's Meat Market
100 W Main St.
Carrboro, NC 27510
(919) 942-2196
http://www.cliffsmeat.qpg.com

“I’ve done a lot of the work myself. I stay here and run it myself and been doing the work myself. I didn’t have to pay someone else, and everything was hands-on with the customers and the meat. And I knew the people, so they would come to see me and we’d talk and they’d buy a little meat, and we’d talk about life in general.”

– Cliff Collins

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Cliff Collins started working in a local meat market when he was still in high school. After five years behind the counter, he decided to open a place of his own. The year was 1973. Thousands of pork chops and chicken breasts later, Cliff’s Meat Market, the last of the family-owned markets in the area, is still going strong. Cliff has built his reputation on quality, variety, and, above all, hospitality. Most all of his customers have been buying from him for years. Some stop in just to chat. Part of his secret, though, is that he isn’t afraid to change with the times. When his customers requested organic meats, he got them. When Latinos came to the Carrboro community, he hired them. Cliff’s is one of the only butcher shops where you’ll find beef sirloin next to marinated pork for tacos al pastor. And it’s certainly the only place you’ll find Cliff.

Listen to this 3-minute audio clip of Cliff Collins talking about working with Carrboro’s Latino community and how his business has changed. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

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What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: Cliff Collins
Location: Cliff’s Meat Market – Carrboro, NC
Date: May 31, 2007
Interviewer: Amy Evans

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Amy Evans:  This is Amy Evans on Thursday, May 31, 2007 in Carrboro, North Carolina, and I’m at Cliff’s Meat Market with Mr. Cliff Collins. And Cliff, would you say your name and also your birth date for the record please, sir?

Cliff Collins:  My name is Cliff Collins. My birth date is June 7, 1948.

And you’re a native of the area, I understand?

Yes, I’m a native of the area, yes—and my family—for 300 years.

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So tell me how you got into the meat business.

It was a job after school in high school to get money to go through high school.

And where was that first job?

Andrews-Riggsbee Grocery.

Did you just kind of learn on the job, trial-by-fire kind of thing, or did someone teach you the art of the butchering?

I learned on the job by doing it.

Can you describe what that was like?

It was all right. It was the first job I ever had that…I was warm when it was cold outside, so I said this all right. I never had a job like this. [Laughs] We had air-condition[ing] inside, so I said this is all right. I think I’ll stick with this a while because I like to. So—it had all the food. [Laughs] And all the pretty people coming in and being able to talk to them. That was all right. Even though it was over the meat case, I learned a lot about the people and it was a different world, and it kind of grew on me.

Did you seek that job out, or was it just kind of a happenstance that you ended up with that job?

It was just by chance. Someone wanted me to come to work for them, and I said, “I’m busy here.” And he said, “No, you need to come to work for me because we need somebody and it’s a good job. And you have a lot of variety of things to learn.” And I said, “Okay, I’ll give it a try.”

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You attended college for a time, did you not?

Yes. And I kept working in the meat market in the same place and attended college for a couple years and then took over manager of the market. And then a year or two later I bought this place [Cliff’s Meat Market], and I’m still here.

What did you study in college?

Maintenance—heating, air-conditioning, refrigeration, tooling, dying, and drafting and all that stuff.

So you were looking for a trade after you got out of college, but then it ended up being that you were already in a trade?

Yes, in the trade, and I use all the skills I learned in college. I do my own refrigeration, which is not illegal. I do my own repairs, remodelings—whatever.

Did you know that going into college that you could use that knowledge in the butcher business or in the market business?

I knew I’d use it in life because life is mostly common sense. And a lot of the work is common sense, putting two and two together.

So tell me how you came to own this place and how you purchased it.

I’ve been renting here for a long time, and the guys that owned it come to sell. And I told them I’d be interested in buying it, but they wanted too much money. So I kept waiting until the price got right, and I bought it.

What year was that?

Two thousand.

What made you decide that you wanted to be an entrepreneur and a small business owner?

I always wanted to be in my own business. I didn’t know what. I was going to build houses when I was in high school, that was my intent was to build houses and landscape and do all kinds of things like that with bulldozers and dump trucks. But I got into this and I said, “Let’s keep on doing it.” And every day I do it and every day, every week, every month, every year, so I’m still doing it.

When you worked at the other market, did you build a reputation and did people start to know you and your personality and then you came over here and used that name to open your own market?

Yes, that was about the best choice I had. I had gotten to know a lot of people, and they were my friends and they would call me up and place orders and come and get it and all knew me by name, and I just kept on doing the same thing. I said, “I don’t want to mess up a good thing. I’ll put my name on the door, and if it works, it works, and if it don’t, I’ll have to do something different.”

And what year was it that you started renting this place?

[Nineteen] seventy-three. The first day. Really, seventy-two. Officially, seventy-three. 1973.

And did I hear right that you sold a tractor and a car and all kinds of things to make the first payment?

Yeah, that’s to get the money to pay the man to get here. In other words, to buy the merchandise in the store and a drink box, a cash register, a meat grinder and things like that, so I could get started. I sold my tractor and my motorcycle and my pickup truck, and all I had was an old car and—but by the end of the year, I had made enough money to buy a new car and a new pickup truck, another tractor, and a motorcycle. I bought the motorcycle back that I sold. [Laughs]

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So in the early days, was your relationship with your suppliers mainly based on your rapport with them? Or was there really a high demand for quality at that time, and you were looking for that in who you worked with? What drove that?

All tied together, it was. They knew me well, so they’d sell to me. But I would buy the—if Armor had the best product—beef this week—even though the price might be a little more, I’d buy their beef. If somebody would pick it out for me or—Swift did a lot and Swift had their own pork they would pick out for me, and I’d get their pork. And maybe Valley Dale would have the best bologna or bacon or something like that. I’d get that from them and other items. I knew which worked best—who had the best bologna, the best ham, the best price, who had the best country hams, who had the best beef, who had the best veal, lamb, and I would switch around and do it that way. That’s what a meat-cutter—a buyer is supposed to do is, you buy for the—you make more money in buying than you can selling, if that tells you anything. So that’s what I had to do. That’s running the business; that’s part of it, and it’s still true today. The big businesses do it now. They go—they’re so big now they tell the people what they will pay them, but then those prices—especially the poultry. I tell the poultry people, “You sell me for that price, and I’ll pick it up at the plant, and you won't have to deliver it, so you save the delivery charge and I can compete. If you don’t, I’m not going to buy from you at all because I can't compete.” So we get this in the fax machine every Monday; we get five or six companies that fax the prices, and then I buy from them. That’s the ones that don’t enhance their stuff. If they enhance it, they can keep it. If they put 12-percent water in it, the price should be 12-percent less when you buy it, and then I can sell it 12-percent less to the customers. But they don’t want to do that, so I don’t buy from them. I let them keep their product and sell it to somebody like—like Wal-Mart. [Laughs]

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How can you explain that you made it this long? That you stood out from the pack?

I’ve done a lot of the work myself, and I stay here and run it myself and been doing the work myself. I didn’t have to pay someone else, and everything was hands-on with the customers and the meat. And I knew the people, so they would come to see me and we’d talk and they’d buy a little meat, and we’d talk about life in general. And I didn’t spend much money; I didn’t blow any. If I did spend it, I spent it on something that would be worth something tomorrow like real estate in this area. So that’s all right.

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So tell me about what it is to be a meat cutter and what kind of skills it requires and that kind of thing.

I think the biggest skill it requires is to be devoted to your job. You can't walk off and leave it; you can't do it in 40 hours a week. You can't take off every time something jumps off and take off and go do that; it don’t work that way, especially if you own your own business. You stay with it and you run it or sell it and get rid of it, one way or the other. That’s what makes it work. That’s what made it work.

What about the meat? What kind of relationship do you have to the product that you sell?

You need to know what you’re selling. You sell what they call cow beef. We call them gully jumpers. That meat is tough. The only thing it works for is ground beef, I guess, but you need to have some good quality. Good quality and good prices and taking care of your customers and keeping the meat cold; the temperature is a big, big thing. I watch my refrigerators like a hawk. Even on Sundays when I’m closed I come here and check my refrigerators and keep everything cold and don’t let it get warm. If you keep it cold—especially poultry—all through the process as you’re doing it, when the customer gets it, they have usually no problems with it. And I do a lot of wholesale so—with the restaurants—so I’ve got to keep it right so that when they get it, they can keep it a day or two or three or four or five and not have problems and their customers will be happy, too. So the restaurant’s customers are really indirectly my customers too, so sometimes I have double customers. When you eat at the restaurant up the street and you buy from me too, you’re a double customer. [Laughs]

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So how has the meat cutting industry changed since you started 30 years ago and where you are today?

[Laughs] It’s changed so much, it’s hard to explain all of it. It used to be I got the beef in and you’d put it on your shoulder and bring it in, and now it comes in in boxes, and it’s already broken down in smaller portions. You buy rib-eyes now—you buy six rib-eyes in the case or five but used to, I’d buy the whole quarter beef and put it on my shoulder and bring it in and put it on the block and block it down and take the rib-eyes out and take the beef ribs out and take the short ribs out and take the trimmings and make ground chuck or ground beef and make the chuck roast, if they’ve got the bone in. Now you can hardly buy it that way—the bone in. You’ve got to special order it. It comes in boneless. I’m talking about the chuck. So a lot of stuff changed, and it took me ten years to get used to it because I was used to it my way, and I was used to giving the customer what they wanted. But now they’ve gotten used to me not doing it. It’s not so bad. Most time, I don’t have it. [Laughs] Now I have this, though, instead and they say, “Okay, give me that.”

Can you list some of the things that you have? I know what you offer is a laundry list of different kinds of meats and things but some of the specialty things and some of the everyday things?

Well the everyday things—one is the main one is any cut of chicken and ground chuck. Ground chuck is a big, big seller. And now in here with the Spanish population coming in, the chorizo [sausage], the beefsteak, the pastor [marinated pork] and the lenguas [tongue] and the menudo [tripe] is everyday stuff. The ham, the bacon, pork chops, ribs, pork ribs, beef ribs, all the stuff like that, which is ordinary stuff now, which it always was. I can't get smoked beef tongues hardly anymore, but I’ve got smoked pork chops so that’s the change. A lot of stuff has changed, yes, it has. Wow, to go back and think about it and now to do what I’m doing the same—it’s less work because I’m getting the rib-eye already cut out, and I don’t have to spend five or ten minutes peeling it out and trimming everything down. It comes already trimmed. All those pieces are already trimmed out. The fat is not so much fat. I used to throw away 500-pounds of fat every other day—just too much fat. Now they keep the fat, and I get the lean. I get just enough fat to make it work.

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So tell me about diversifying your product here and embracing the community’s and customers’ demands for new and different products like the chorizo and—and the Latino community here.

You follow what it takes, and you change with the world. The world is changing everyday; this town changed a lot. Carrboro is a wonderful place to live, and so many people want to live in Carrboro, and we don’t have enough housing for them, especially houses. They’re begging for them. They—they see me on the map, they look on the Internet and they write me letters, “Do you have a piece of land I can buy to build a house on?” And maybe it’s the store, and they don’t realize it’s on Main Street in Carrboro, and I can't sell it to build a house on. So that’s the demand: they’re wanting—from California and Oregon and Michigan—they’re wanting to move here to live in Carrboro. Maybe they went to school here and now they want to come back to Carrboro. So Carrboro is a highly sought after place, and the people changing [it] is not only Hispanics. We’ve got people from England here; we’ve got people from Ecuador and everywhere. They’re coming from France, Germany, and India, and they want to—the things they’re used to having, so I work trying to say, “Well bring me a picture of it, and I can look at the meat and tell where it—mostly where it come from, especially if it’s beef. And I say, “Oh yeah, that’s special trim. That’s no problem; I’ve got it right here.” They say, “Oh, it does look like it now.” [Laughs]

So you’ve come across things that people from different cultures are asking for when it’s maybe named something else here?

Yeah. The same product may have ten names, and it’s maybe cut a little different—cut a different angle. They’ve got one now they call a tri-tip. It’s just the cap off the top of the sirloin. That’s a big California thing, and now they come in here, and we end up buying the tri-tips by the case because the people—the California people moving here are asking for the tri-tip and they’re teaching the other people how to cook it. It’s similar to a flank steak, as far as you cut it and slice it thin and marinate it, and so it’s a good piece of meat.

So has that been an interesting kind of learning experience for you to have people—outsiders—come in and kind of convey these new names and uses for these things that you’ve always worked with?

Oh, yes. And also it’s satisfying me to get what they want and to be able to tell them, “Oh yes, I can get that. I know what it is.” And they say, “You really do?” They say, “Nobody else in town—I’ve been everywhere; they don’t know what I’m talking about.” I said, “That’s the reason you need to come here.” [Laughs] And I can probably tell them that, “I can get this for you. Now if you just give me a picture of it. I know the cow well enough after all the years that I can tell you where it come from. I can tell you by the grain of the meat and what part of the cow it was in—most every time or the shape of it or the texture or the—just a view of how the muscle grows and tell them what they want.

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So with all the employees that you have here, do you still cut quite a lot of meat [yourself], or what’s your schedule like these days?

Not as much as I used to. I do more in the management part, running back and forth to the warehouse like I just done while ago. But no, they do really great and—and these Spanish speaking guys, the—the American customers come in and now they’re coming in and calling them by name, “Hey Juan, hey Gerardo, get me three rib-eyes, three inches—an inch thick.” Or, “Get me two one-pounds of ground chuck and a chicken cut up like Cliff cuts it and a sirloin steak an inch-and-a-half thick.” And they’ll get it altogether and they’re gone and they’re happy, and they keep coming back, and I like that.

So your employees have learned to do things the way you did them for your old long-term customers?

Oh, yeah. I trained them my way. I’d rather have them that don’t know anything and train them my way than have them—they’ve been cutting meat before and they think they know it that way, but it don’t work as well here—it works good here in this store. Every place, I could move down the street a mile and it would be different so—.

What is one of the key things that you try to teach them about meat cutting?

Please the customer and make sure everything is fresh and try not to make mistakes. Don’t cheat the customer, but don’t cheat us either. You’ve got to stay right on the line perfect, and you can do that with the machinery we’ve got. We can do that.

Have they, in turn, brought other knowledge or techniques in meat cutting or different products that have taught you a thing or two or—?

Yes, they have. A whole lot. We have the customers—a lot of times the customers come in and say, “Well, when I was in Mexico—” or “When I was in El Salvador, we got the chicken breast sliced thin.” I said, “Okay, no problem.” They say, “What do you mean, no problem?” I said, “Let’s take the knife, and then I’ll slice it thin. Is that thin enough?” They said, “Yeah, that’s exactly right.” And the next thing you know, I’ve got ten people waiting in line to get the same item. And the guy that’s slicing the breast—not with a machine but with a hand knife—just slices it. And the customers like to see you do that. They don’t want you to slice it ahead of time; they want you to do it right then. And they come in to get the beefsteak, they want to watch you slice it, and they don’t care if they’ve got to wait a minute or two. They’d rather see it sliced than take it out of the counter already sliced, and they come here so they can see that it’s sliced and watch what we’re doing. And I’ve—why I’ve got the market open—I’ve got the market open so the customers can see what’s happening. I even bought scales so they would read on the customer’s side and my side, so that they’ll see what we’re doing on the scales. So in other words, I don’t try to hide anything from my customers. It won't pay off. They won't be happy with that.

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Well and how about the demand for organic meats and that trend and what that’s meant to your business?

It’s more in demand now than ever because people, you know—I guess the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s they were not smart enough to realize that they were hurting themselves by giving them stuff they didn’t need. And I grew up—we raised our own stuff—‘til—I was old—we raised corn and gave it to the pigs and cows. We raised everything and gave it to them and it was all organic. But then they—they changed things around and wanted to go to this souped up stuff like steroids that—what do we need that for? He’ll be—he’ll be—it will taste better; he [the animal] might not be so big. If he gets too big, you can't handle him. [Laughs] On the farm that’s what we talked about, “Hey, he’s too big.” He’ll kill you, if he walked over top of you. I’m talking about the cows and pigs. So we’d raise them to what they needed to be, and we’d slaughter them and try not to make pets out of them first. But anyway, it was—I never dreamed that when I was a little kid that things like that would—that we feed animals that would hurt them because you know what the animals eat? We eat the animals—it’s like we eat it almost the same. It’s one—one step down from it, so we don’t need that to break down our systems and make us not as healthy. So the organic is real popular right now. All natural is more popular because it’s not so expensive, compared to a certified organic and certified organic versus natural—you can have them both side-by-side and almost it would be the same thing. But if you’ve got a fencepost that’s creosote, it’s not organic; and if it’s pressure treated, it’s not organic because some of the pressure treated—pressure treated stuff maybe have arsenic in it, especially if it’s ten years back—five years back. And they don’t want the cow to get up against that, and then she won't be organic anymore. [Laughs] She gets around it. So things like that—the type of wire they’re putting on the fences, the type of grass inside the pasture; maybe if you got a creek running down through it that’s coming from a—a river or something that’s coming up the stream that they used any organic stuff in, and then they’ll drink the water and then they wouldn’t be organic again. See, the water needs to be tested, too, because it’s just like the food, the water is. If it’s something in the water, it’s going straight into the animal, so you need to test the water too to make sure this is all natural, you know, or organic. In other words, to be certified organic, the water—all the food including the water, everything in the surroundings had to be certified by the government before you can put that stamp on there that says certified organic.

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So you were a one-man operation when you started then, is that right?

Yes.

And how many employees do you have now?

Fourteen, I think. Something like that. Fourteen, counting the one that collects for me every other Tuesday, and one that sweeps up the yard and things like that. So it’s, I think, fourteen.

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So what do you like best about what you do?

The people—the very best people. Without that, I’d go home. I wouldn’t need to do this; I could go home and relax and work on my houses.

Well what do you think the future of Cliff’s Meat Market is?

I don’t know. If I live, this will stay here. [Laughs] I’ll keep it going; it will be all right. I think it will be fine. It’s going to grow. I’ll make it grow more.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.