This Turkey Really Has Legs

But stripped to their essence, all these seemingly old-fashioned practices really reflect a well-thought-out mode of doing business that consists of two basic tenets: Treat your customers with the utmost respect, and stick to things you know. For instance, Joyce, a spry woman of 77 for whom Greenberg smoked turkeys have literally been a life's work, sums up the family's argument for not taking credit cards with a couple of biting questions: "Do you not trust people? Do you not think that, basically, people are good?" Requiring customers to prepay for their orders with credit cards, her son interjects, would tacitly say to them, We don't trust you. "And we won't say that to our customers," he adds.

As for sticking with things you know, Greenberg says that in the same way he would never change how he smokes turkeys, he wants to leave the business--except the shipping-- exactly the way it is and always has been (right down to the plain white boxes) because, quite simply, it works. Well. "I want my tombstone to read, 'Here lies Sam Greenberg. He didn't do anything to mess up Greenberg Turkey!' " he says.

"Why would I want to take credit cards? Why would I want to do a marketing campaign? In fact, why would I add more products to the line?" Greenberg asks. "The people I would get from doing all that, well, frankly, I don't want those people."

The people he wants are more of the customers he already has--the ones who greatly enjoy their Greenberg turkey once a year and then promptly pay the bill once it arrives. He wants their friends, family members, and business associates. What he doesn't want is a bunch of strangers responding to a slick pitch in some mass marketing campaign. "This business has enjoyed more success due to things I haven't done rather than because of things I have done," Greenberg says.

There are other things that won't change at Greenberg's. By October, the smokehouses will have begun to belch hickory smoke around the clock. The calls will have started coming in, frighteningly slow at first, then too fast to handle. Tractor-trailers will line up to get their haul of 35,000 pounds' worth of smoked meat that will be trucked to tables from New Orleans to New York.

And despite the counterintuitiveness of it all--the burnt-looking bird, the creaky business practices--by the morning of December 26, Greenberg's will fall silent with yet another successful turkey-selling season in the bag.

Ryan Underwood (runderwood@fastcompany.com) brought some smoked turkey into the office, but not enough.