Joe’s Butcher Shop is now offering more ways for customers to get their meat.
The locally owned merchant is now offering a delivery service for homes bounded by 96th Street, 146th Street, Michigan Road and River Road to start. Customers can call 846-8877 and place their orders by 2 p.m. before a delivery day. Delivery times will be 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday to start. Cost should be $7.50 to start.
Owner Joe Lazzara said he hopes delivery will be convenient for customers who are unable to drive to the shop. Call-ahead curbside delivery has already been an option for some time.
“Service has always been our hallmark and this is just another way to extend our service platform out to the public and lack of convenience has been always been not to visit and we wanted to remove that barrier for our customers,” he said.
The delivery van has been upgrade with refrigeration, shelving and tracking software. Customers are asked to leave a cooler on their front step if they aren’t home, but if they forget to leave one, then Joe’s will leave a disposable cooler with ice packs for a small charge to keep the delivery fresh while it sits on your porch.
As soon as he announced the delivery service, Lazzara was bombarded with responses from eager customers who wanted to place orders outside of the delivery boundaries. He said they will explore expanding the service over time if they can keep the delivery price reasonable. But his biggest concern is to do it right.
“It doesn’t mean we won’t expand that over time,” he said. “We wanted to make sure we could deliver one hundred percent of our commitment to our customers. We hope as we grow and the service catches on, we’ll be able to serve everyone.”
In the future, there might be a smartphone app where customers can place their orders easily. Lazzara said the problem that they always run into is that they are a custom-cut butcher shop so orders can be more complicated just asking for ten steaks. Customers can request specific cuts, specific packaging, etc. So the app they’re developing might need to include all of the custom modifiers.
“At least with a restaurant, they can order off a menu,” he said. “My possibilities are endless. I can sell a steak a hundred different ways.”
