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This story has been updated to add comment from Eric Brinsfield.
For more than 40 years, Chapel Hill had a “must-see” destination. No, not the Dean Smith Center, Kenan Stadium, or the North Carolina Botanical Garden. It was a specialty food emporium called A Southern Season, a source of comfort and pride to locals and an awe-inspiring mecca for visitors.
“If anyone came in from out of town or people came back to UNC for ball games or whatever, they went to Southern Season,” said Jim Jones, who held senior positions in the company for four years. “It was a rite of passage in Chapel Hill.”
There were aisles of items you couldn’t buy anywhere else. There were coffee beans, loose-leaf tea, ice cream, and gift baskets. The store had an extensive cheese section with cheese straws of the rosemary, chive, blue cheese, and bacon persuasion. There were dozens of chocolate varieties, toffee, and jelly beans, and 500 kinds of jams and jellies. It had 200 kinds of nuts and snacks, 32 linear feet of hot and barbecue sauces. There were local and global creations—Sternschnuppe cheese from Germany, English mince pies, and Belgian chocolate truffles.
The store sold flowers, small kitchen appliances, linens and candles, and almost 10,000 different wines—with the most expensive kept behind a locked door—and 4,000 beers from all over the world. You could buy a glass and “sip and shop.” While that is becoming common in grocery stores today, “That was something we really started,” said Liz Cooper, who for years headed the store’s wine department.
It offered cooking classes in an upstairs room with tiered seating and TV screens for people to watch the lessons taught by such notable chefs as Jacques Pépin, Ina Garten, Patricia Wells, and Sheri Castle. It had weekly wine tastings and a restaurant, the Weathervane.
Some called A Southern Season a grocery store, but it really wasn’t. It sold no fresh produce. “You could not buy dog food. You could not buy toilet paper,” said Jay White, who held various senior positions, including general manager, in his 21 years with Southern Season. “What you could buy was a really high-end piece of prosciutto.”
Southern Season had a reputation for being expensive, but the staff knew their products, could explain the difference between olive oil from Italy and olive oil from Spain, and could describe the different cheeses in detail.
The place was “foodie heaven,” as one shopper described it.
“I loved Southern Season from the first time I stepped into its original sprawling Chapel Hill store,” wrote Lynn Seldon, a writer who has covered the travel and culinary industries for years. “The product offerings were unlike anywhere else, and the customer service was ahead of its time.”
Then in 2020, after 45 years in business, it was gone—shuttered even before the pandemic wreaked havoc on American commerce. While the name “Southern Season” survives as a store in Graham that mostly handles online orders, the 57,000-square-foot store at Chapel Hill’s University Mall was demolished and is now just a fond memory. What happened is a complicated story that includes increased competition, overexpansion, perhaps a little hubris, and claims of financial deception.
But ask anyone. They miss it.
First, Coffee
A Southern Season began with coffee. Michael Barefoot, a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate, had just returned from a European trip where he encountered various foods and coffees that spurred his interest. In 1975, he opened an 800-foot coffee shop in a strip mall three miles from the university campus.
He found a century-old coffee roaster and got to work. “Rehabilitating the mothballed machine required salvaged parts from all over the U.S. and Europe,” Barefoot wrote in an email.
But his venerable roaster “used to belch black smoke, acidic smoke,” said White. “It didn’t take him long to realize that he was not going to be popular in the neighborhood, so he started roasting at night only.”
The original roaster was later replaced with others, both antique and modern, Barefoot wrote, “but we always kept the original in a spotlight in the background.”
From its coffee beginnings, Barefoot said, “I was confident that customers would show us the way forward.” They did. He added candy, chocolate, and bakery items. Then he got an alcohol license and sold wine.
He worked hard. “He set himself a goal of making X number of dollars every day,” White said, and would stay open until he reached that goal. Sometimes that was after midnight. In 1978, Barefoot outgrew his cramped store and moved to a 28,000-square-foot site in Eastgate Mall that is now a Trader Joe’s. He added a wine bar, a deli, and more goods.
“He always wanted to be on the cutting edge,” White said. “He was one of the first to literally bring in balsamic vinegar, which today sounds just hilarious, but it’s true. Where in 1979 could you buy balsamic vinegar in Chapel Hill? You couldn’t.”
Barefoot’s husband, Tim Manale, was also heavily involved. The two worked to find European and other rare foods. People would bring a chocolate wrapper from something they’d had overseas and ask, “Can you get this?” White said. “We would find it.”
“I was confident that customers would show us the way forward.”
Michael Barefoot, Southern Season founder
But they also emphasized local producers, such as Chapel Hill Toffee, ABC Pie Company of Raleigh, Big Spoon Roasters in Durham, and Bear Branch Milling Co., a maker of grits and honey in Tabor City.
In a college town, students stay for only a few years and then move on. Barefoot began to get requests. “Can you send me a pound of that wonderful chicory coffee?” White recalled. After that happened time and again, they expanded to offer a catalog and mail-order business, which became a major revenue source.
In 2003, he moved to a football field–sized emporium in University Place.
Barefoot required that the store open five minutes early and close five minutes late compared to the posted hours because “everybody’s watch is a little off,” White said. His managers were out on the floor greeting customers. “We concentrated on knowing people’s names and knowing what their favorite wines were,” White said.
Barefoot was very hands-on and could be intimidating. “He would walk in, and if a stapler wasn’t in the right place on the desk, he would be irked by that,” said Jones. Gift baskets became a big thing. Barefoot went to China to find the right size and shape; the baskets were to be part of the gift.
As the inventory and store grew, the staff expanded as well—and so did an esprit de corps, a culture.
“It was a real melting pot of different personalities and different demographics,” said Jones. “It’s the only place I’ve ever worked that I could call people on a Sunday morning and say, ‘I need you to come in today.’ And whoever you called would say yes.”
It was more than Barefoot could have ever envisioned. “There were ups and downs, easy years and very hard ones,” he said. “But how lucky could one starry-eyed kid be? I had spent my whole adult life doing something that I absolutely adored.”
Growing Pains
As the store grew, it became harder to manage. Finances tightened. Then came the recession. “2008 was a disastrous year for lots of retail people,” said White. “I think [Barefoot] would’ve gone on forever except for 2008.”
He’d declined to open another shop, saying he couldn’t be in two places at once, and he was wary of investors beyond a circle of family and friends. But the company needed more capital, and that would have to come from outside investors, which would mean a loss of control.
He decided to sell.
“It suddenly felt like this was the time,” Barefoot said in an email. “I trusted that promises of increased sophistication and funding would provide success and security for what had become a very big family of stakeholders.”
“I think financially he was in no position to keep it,” said Cooper. “He had to sell.”
Enter W. Clay Hamner, then director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Duke University and a venture capitalist with a resume that included serving on Wendy’s board of directors, and investing in the New York bridal boutique Kleinfeld Inc. and the Cary-based convenience store giant The Pantry.
“It’s the only place I’ve ever worked that I could call people on a Sunday morning and say, ‘I need you to come in today.’ And whoever you called would say yes.”
Jim Jones, former employee
“For a long time, I had been talking to Michael Barefoot about expanding. I was just trying to invest,” Hamner told Business North Carolina in 2015. TC Capital Fund, a joint venture of Carrboro Capital Corporation and Tryon Capital Ventures, bought the store in 2011. Its managing partners were Peter Reichard, Peter Coker, and Hamner, who also became chief executive officer.
Hamner loved A Southern Season, said Cooper. He shopped there and thought it was a great concept that ought to enter a larger world. He planned to establish Southern Season in as many as 10 cities around the country—places like Charlotte, Asheville, and Wilmington, but also Atlanta, Nashville, Northern Virginia, and Florida—build sales to about $400 million a year, take the company public, and then go nationwide.
They say love is blind, which is perhaps why Hamner and others didn’t see the looming pitfalls. They led to recriminations, lawsuits, regrets, and hurt feelings. Some former employees don’t want to talk about it, even today.
The new management changed the store’s look, making it feel more open by shortening the metal shelves that held the thousands of items. They even slightly changed its name. It had been “A Southern Season” for years because Barefoot believed the “A” meant the name would come up high in any kind of search. Now it was just “Southern Season.” “It was a little thing, but was also a big thing,” said White. The new name seemed less distinguishing to many employees.
A new marketing director also rebranded the store logo and signage from kelly green to red and white. “People immediately started making fun of us because we looked like Target,” said White.
TC Capital Fund management also caused friction. “We went through three general managers in 18 months,” said Jones. “And I will say that the team hated every one of them.” They didn’t listen to department managers and took the buying decisions away from those who knew their customers best. “You have to be on the floor,” said Cooper. “You need to experience the customer first before you make those decisions.”
Jones was skeptical when Gena Shreve arrived as general manager in 2012. “I avoided her for a week when she got hired because I didn’t even want to get to know another general manager,” he said. Then, one day, in a scene out of a Hollywood rom-com, he saw her starting to fall on some steps outside his office. “I jumped over my desk, and I caught her.” They are now married and living in Raleigh.
Hamner established much smaller satellite stores called “A Taste of Southern Season” at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, in downtown Charleston, and as pop-up Christmas locations in Raleigh and Charlotte. But he also did things that mystified many employees, such as refinishing the concrete floors between Thanksgiving and Christmas one year, when customer volume would be highest. He ordered the walls to be painted green, and then complained that it looked terrible, said Jim Jones.
“Clay pissed off Susan [Gravely], who owned Vietri,” a popular line of colorful Italian ceramics, said Gena (then Shreve, now Jones). “He got mad that she was selling at other places. He wanted it to be exclusive. And Susan’s like, ‘No, it’s not going to be an exclusive.’” Hamner dropped Vietri, or maybe Susan Gravely dropped Southern Season, but Vietri wasn’t there anymore, except for a few isolated items.
In 2013, Hamner opened a 40,000-square-foot store in a former Food Lion in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, to great fanfare, hiring more than 200 workers. Like the flagship, it would have a cooking school and restaurant.
Hamner opened a 50,000-square-foot store on the outskirts of downtown Richmond, Virginia, the following year, drawing “hordes of curious people,” as one local reporter put it.
But they didn’t stay curious for long in South Carolina or Virginia.
The South Carolina store was in Mount Pleasant, across the bridge from Charleston. “People don’t cross the bridge,” said Cooper. “Mount Pleasant goes to Charleston. Charleston doesn’t come to Mount Pleasant.” The location also meant it didn’t benefit from the city’s cruise and tourist economy.
It was also hard to replicate the culture of the flagship store. “We had a lot of people with a lot of years of service in Chapel Hill, and they created an environment that was a learning environment,” said Jones. “So, if you got hired as a college student with a part-time job, and you went into say, cheese, well, then you got a tutorial in cheese and you learned new stuff about cheese every day.”
At the new shops “you’ve got people that are a month into the culture, trying to run a department and train people,” Jones said.
Outside of North Carolina, the name “Southern Season” didn’t mean much. For all they knew it could be a gardening store, said Sheri Castle, who taught many cooking classes at the flagship.
UNC is, of course, a big influence in Chapel Hill, and Southern Season took a lot of themed items over the border. “You want to talk about product not selling,” said Jones. Take the toffee packaged in Carolina blue boxes. “You’re not going to sell a Clemson guy or a University of South Carolina guy anything light blue ever.” Despite the store’s namesake, to many in Charleston, “we were Yankee carpet baggers,” said Gena Jones.
The Richmond site was “an absolute disaster,” said both Joneses simultaneously—losing more than $1 million a year, according to Clay Hamner. The culture didn’t transfer well there, either. The rent was high, as were the costs of maintaining an 80,000-item inventory. Sales didn’t meet expectations. “It just didn’t ramp up as fast as we thought it would,” Hamner told The News & Observer.
In Chapel Hill, Southern Season “was more than a store,” said Gena Jones. “It was more than a restaurant. It was more than a cooking school. There was a culture so ingrained there,” and that couldn’t just be picked up and dropped somewhere else.
The company’s product mix began to change, moving more toward tools—grill lighters shaped like shotguns or fishing rods, cutting boards in the shape of the state. Hamner “went after every gadget he could find,” because he thought they would sell, said Jay White. Some items were no longer exclusive, White said. “All of a sudden, we weren’t the only one in town with balsamic vinegar.”
The Beginning of the End
The growth may have succeeded if they had aimed smaller, like the satellite “Taste of Southern Season” stores, said Cooper: “Money became so tight because they threw so much money in these large expansions.”
“We lost the local vendors because they weren’t paying them, and that was a big black eye in the community,” White said.
Southern Season filed for bankruptcy in June 2016, listing $9.8 million in assets and $18.3 million in liabilities. It owed The Blakemere Company in Chapel Hill, maker of English foods such as clotted cream and treacle tarts, $1,404, according to the bankruptcy filing as reported by The News & Observer. Raleigh’s Escazú Artisan Chocolates was owed $1,031, according to the filing, while Jeff Milliken of Bear Branch Milling said the company was owed almost $10,000. (The News & Observer reported it was owed $13,682.)
The Richmond store closed in April 2016. The Mount Pleasant site closed a month later. Creditors pressed Southern Season to find a buyer. On August 5, 2016, Hamner resigned as CEO. Two weeks later, Southern Season was sold to Calvert Retail, a Delaware-based kitchen retailer, for $3.5 million. By 2019, all Southern Season locations were closed except in Chapel Hill. It didn’t have much life left.
To Liz Cooper, a key mistake was a decision to no longer accept gift cards. Businesses can accumulate capital from unredeemed gift cards or partly unredeemed cards. One report in 2023 said Americans have as much as $21 billion of unspent money in unused or lost gift cards. The downside is companies must fund the cards if they are redeemed, and Southern Season potentially had thousands of dollars in outstanding gift card debt.
But when Calvert Retail owner Eric Brinsfield bought the company in 2016, he bought the lease in Chapel Hill, the trade names, and the inventory of the business, but not its books and records. “It would have been reckless from an accounting standpoint to honor the obligations (such as gift cards) of a bankrupt business without their books and records,” Brinsfield said.
“Eliminating gift card acceptance left the customer base feeling angry and scammed out of their dollars, and it went a long way to damage the goodwill that 40 years of Southern Season had built,” Cooper said.
“It was more than a restaurant. It was more than a cooking school. There was a culture so ingrained there.”
Gena Jones, former employee
Investors who had financed the company during the Hamner years wanted their money back. In 2017, GGC Associates, the landlord for the Richmond store, sued Hamner and the company’s former chief finance officer, Brian Fauver, seeking $450,000 and alleging they had misled GGC about the company’s financial health. Hamner and Fauver denied any wrongdoing, though Hamner acknowledged that Southern Season was sometimes late with the rent but had never missed a payment. In 2018, a federal judge in Virginia ended the case, saying that GGC failed to show that Hamner or Fauver committed fraud in soliciting its investment.
In 2019, investor W. Robert Bizzell sued Hamner, Reichard, and Coker, alleging they engaged in “constructive fraud” by withholding information about the company’s financial difficulties. The case was settled out of court in 2020 with the details kept confidential.
Hamner declined to comment for this story: “I don’t have anything to say, thank you.”
Calvert Retail closed the Chapel Hill store in January 2020. The store was “an amazing place, I get it, but not sustainable,” Brinsfield said. He decided to focus on the online business operating out of the Graham store. “We are sending out thousands of amazing gifts,” he said, “and we sell gift cards.”
Many former employees blame Hamner for the demise of the business. “I didn’t like the way he led us, but I liked the guy,” said Gena Jones. “He cared tremendously about the people that worked for him and wanted them to be successful.”
Cooper doesn’t see much point in affixing blame. “I’m not pointing the finger at anybody,” she said. “I don’t have anything bad to say about Clay, and I know that lots of people blame him.” But many people made mistakes, she said.
Perhaps it was simply that Southern Season “ran its cycle.”
Still, she said, “I have some of the best friendships and relationships in my life from Southern Season.”
“Of course, I miss A Southern Season along with so many others,” Barefoot wrote in an email. “Watching the store’s decline during its final years was so painful.” But the building’s demolition also brought relief, he said. It gave him more time with his husband, Tim Manale, who died of ALS in 2023. “I am deeply grateful for these last years when we weren’t always thinking/talking/dreaming about work.”
Many have regrets, even maybe some anger. But they also have satisfaction. “We were all very proud to work there,” said Jim Jones.
Bill Arthur is a former Washington correspondent for the Charlotte Observer and a former reporter and editor for Bloomberg News in Washington, D.C. He is the author of the recently released book, Fearrington: Creating an English-Style Village in the Carolina Countryside. He did a brief stint in Southern Season’s wine department in late 2014.