A neighborhood staple After 18 years, Beau Mart owner ready to sell popular local stop
Susan Angelini, owner of Beau Mart, is shown Thursday behind the counter at the popular stop in South Strabane Township.
Beau Mart, a longtime market and deli in South Strabane Township, is for sale.
In this photo taken sometime in the 1940s, from left, Marie Mitchell, Della Evans, Patty Neff and Lorena Neff paused in front of Beau Mart.
Susan Angelini owns a place where, she swears, everybody knows your name.
“We’re like ‘Cheers,’ a neighborhood spot where everyone knows everyone,” said the owner of Beau Mart, an iconic convenience store in South Strabane Township that is more than a conventional convenience store. It is equal parts grocery, deli, kitchen, gift shop, snack stop and lottery outlet, without a chain’s inflated prices or overcooked franks.
Beau Mart even sells milkshakes and the wonderfully retro Bun candy bar – almost everything but gasoline, which it once did. (Pumps, from days of yore, are the reason for the distinctive roof out front.)
Now, after 18 years, Angelini is planning to retire. She recently put the market on the market, listing it with the Cypher Group, headed by Jerry Cypher. The business is for sale, with an option to buy or lease the rest of the 0.78-acre property. A rentable apartment is on the second floor.
A sale at 1075 E. Beau St. would be bittersweet.
“It’s going to be emotional,” said Angelini, 62, who lives in Washington with her husband, Jim. “I’m going to miss people.
“What a great experience. I had never owned a business before, so it’s very satisfying to have had one for 18 years that has been profitable. It’s been a success because of our employees and customers. Our employees make things run smoothly.”
Angelini has nine employees, whom she praises collectively. They tend to a store that is open daily, from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on the weekend.
She starts earlier than most, and is as versatile as the mart itself. Not only does Angelini own and operate the facility, she deals with suppliers, stocks shelves, runs the register, prepares foods and serves as chef. All salads are made from scratch there; meatballs, hot sausage and pulled pork are homemade.
“Our Beau Dip and chicken salad are two favorites,” Angelini said, adding that she works with 40 pounds of chicken breast a week to make the store’s chicken salad and chicken noodle soup.
Although she has a photo of Beau Mart from the mid-1940s, Angelini isn’t sure when it opened. That shot, which accompanies this article, features a family in front of a car with what appears to be a gas-rationing sticker on the windshield. Esso pumps are in the background.
While growing up in Carmichaels, as a coal miner’s daughter, Angelini didn’t envision herself running a business like this. She wanted to be a Spanish teacher, “but our family couldn’t afford college.”
Instead, she attended West Virginia Career College for a year, then held a few secretarial positions before settling in as an office manager for Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. Angelini worked in J&L’s coal division for 16 years, in McMurray and California.
She didn’t work for a while in between, while raising two sons and a daughter. The three are adults now, but all live nearby – two very nearby. One son is in the second-story apartment, the other in an adjacent house, which the mother owns but is not part of the property. Both have worked at Beau Mart, and the daughter – despite having a full-time job – still does.
Angelini purchased Beau Mart in 1998, which led to a whirlwind opening week that August. Son Jimmy was a shortstop for the Washington team playing in the PONY League World Series nearby.
“We opened the Monday the series started,” his mother said. “It was quite the hectic week to say the least.”
It was quite the rewarding week as well. Besides embarking on an endeavor she would quickly love, Susan Angelini watched Jimmy’s team make a somewhat unexpected surge into the final. The locals, alas, lost to Chinese Taipei.
She has enjoyed these 18 years at Beau Mart, working to satisfy costumers, varying the selections, striving to patronize local suppliers including Joe’s Bakery and Albert’s Meats. Angelini said she has had few problems there, even dismissing the Cameron Road project down the hill as a minor disruption.
Visitors have included a couple of Pittsburgh TV reporters, one for a massive-jackpot lottery story, and a local sports legend from the early 2000s.
“Darius Kasparaitis came in when he was with the Penguins,” Angelini said, referring to a popular Lithuanian American tough guy whose overtime goal won a 2001 playoff series against Buffalo.
“He got a tuna sandwich. I didn’t know who he was. He asked, ‘Do you have Too-na?'”
Out of that “Cheers” moment, she now knows his name.