The First Dad’s

  We’re going to reach deep into the archives as we take a look at the very first Dad’s.  Though back then, it wasn’t even called Dad’s - Carl Dyck, the owner and president of Dad’s Organic Market, started off with his first retail store near the town of Fort St. John, in northern British Columbia.  Growing up on a farm about an hour outside of the city, Carl had been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and decided to be his own boss, operating a small grocery and confectionary store for the local community of farmers.  Carl started the store at the age of 18 right on the family farm, in a small building that was 11 feet wide by 22 feet long.

  So what kind of products did the first store sell?  Since it served the local farming community (Fort St. John was an hour away), Carl tried to keep all the basics in stock: cereals such as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and puffed wheat, many of the popular soft drinks such as Coke, Pepsi, Sprite and Fanta, cocoa, Campbell’s soups, frozen hamburger and four foot long coils of baloney.  Produce was not very popular in Carl’s first store, simply due to the fact that when your principal customers are farmers, they are going to have their own produce from their own gardens.  There were a few produce items stocked when possible, though, including onions, Macintosh apples and carrots (in the winter time).

  The name for Carl’s first store was ‘C & D General Store’.  The name came about as Carl’s father, Frank, went to town for his son to pick up his first order of goods.  When Frank went to pay for the items, the clerk asked what the name of the business was - something that Carl hadn’t thought of yet.  Not sure what to say, Frank made up his own name right on the spot - ‘C & D General Store’, where ‘C’ stands for Carl and ‘D’ stands for Dad.  A hint of things to come where ‘Dad’ would become part of the name of the store again years later.

  Carl originally started off with fairly standard hours - 9am to 6pm, Monday to Saturday, closed on Sundays.  Aside from Christmas, New Years and Easter, the store was always open as Carl continued to try and grow the business.   Fairly soon Carl started to notice a pattern, however; regular store hours didn’t work in the middle of a farming community. Local farmers would get on the job early in the morning and end late in the evening.  So Carl expanded the hours from 7am to 11pm, a sixteen hour work day.  Hey, that’s what entrepreneurs do!  At the same time he ran the local post office out of his store as well, working as the local post master for seven years.

  After handing off the store to his brother and sister for a year while he worked in town, Carl was back at the age of 21 when he built a newer store a short distance away on an acreage.  The new store was quite a bit larger at 28 by 40 feet.  He ran this one for the next seven years, at which point Carl and Ann packed up their van and headed for Saskatchewan with their four year old son Kevin and one year old son Wayne to establish the first Dad’s store, this time with natural and organic groceries.