Groceryman: a Memoir of Family, Identity, Prophecy, and the Fate Storied Grocery Empire

In 1912, the author's grandfather with his cousin, Druze immigrants from Lebanon, started a grocery business in a rented room across from the Buick factory in Flint, Michigan. Because they spoke little English and didn't know the names of the products they had for sale, they devised a system for customers to go around the store selecting what they wanted. It was the beginning of self-serve for grocery stores and the customers liked it. Fifty-four years later, in 1966, Hamady Bros. was Flint's dominant grocer with thirteen-hundred employees and one-hundred million dollars in revenue.Groceryman tells the story of the author growing up with his grandfather's prophecy: Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. Which meant that the business he'd built with hard work and sound values would flourish and grow under his son, then falter and fall under the author and his brother, the "silver spoon" grandsons. And so it was. Twenty-three years after Michael Hamady died in 1968, Hamady Bros. closed its doors and was liquidated. His prophecy had come true, but not in the way he imagined.Between the prophecy's declaration and its realization, Groceryman is the humorous and harrowing story of the author seeking freedom from his old-country mother's supervision of his physical functions, and from his physically formidable father "asking" only two things: where he will work (Hamady Bros.), and who he will marry (Druze).And it is the story of the author's turnaround in a psychiatrist's office that would lead to Hamady Bros' fate.