Rowan Magazine | The People. The Places. The Way of Life.

Growing up with a name like Rock Stone was a bit of a challenge and a bit of a blessing, but the owner of Stone Seafood in China Grove says he always felt comfortable being different.
     When he was in middle school, instead of spending summers at the movies or hanging out with his friends, Stone often accompanied his father, a school administrator, to the coast to catch shrimp to bring back to Kannapolis to sell.
    As an 11-year-old, he would sometimes grumble about having to make those trips, but today he makes his living from the wealth of fishing knowledge that began back then. And he’s especially grateful to be making a living doing what makes him happy rather than working 8 to 5 in an office.
     At his market, located off Highway 29 near Stag ’N Doe, he operates a retail shop when he’s not busy supplying seafood to restaurants across the Piedmont. Whether fishing himself or relying on the skill of tried-and-true fishermen he’s met through the years, he guarantees that what he sells is fresh, high-quality and caught in the best locations possible – in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and beyond.
     “People said the retail shop wouldn’t work,” Stone said of the three-year-old business. “They said the prices would be too high for people to afford to shop here, but I just didn’t believe it. I think if you offer quality at the best price you can, people will recognize that.”
     “I wanted a seafood market like I would want to walk into,” he added. “I have a clean shop, not smelly like most fish places, and I am open only the days I have fresh fish to sell. If a shop is open Monday, you’re going to get fish left over from Thursday. That’s just the way it is.”
     The seafood he sells usually is caught on Wednesday night and comes to the shop on Thursday morning. He spends all day and evening Thursday cutting and preparing the fish for sale, often leaving the shop in the wee hours of Friday morning.
     “Even when I didn’t have a sign up, people would come banging on the door at 9 o’clock on Thursday nights wanting to buy fish,” said Stone, the shop’s only full-time employee. He does get help from part-time employees and his wife, Jennifer, when she’s not working as a nurse at NorthEast Medical Center.
     Their work schedules allow the Stones to care for their 5-year-old son, Luke, without sending him to day care. “I tried the insurance business for a while, but I like selling fish more,” Stone said. “I opened this business so I could be home with my family more. It gives me more freedom and is a lot more fun.”
     While he could make a living supplying fish to his restaurant clients, Stone said the retail side of his business makes him the happiest. His goal is to treat his customers fairly.
    The market’s biggest seller, volume-wise, is croaker, followed by flounder, salmon and shrimp, but Stone says he can get “just about anything.” Still, rather than make requests, customers have learned to trust his judgment. “It’s fresh, and I guarantee that. I’d rather you be mad that we don’t have something in particular than be mad that you bought something that wasn’t good,” he explained. “If you educate the customers, they’ll be picky and appreciate the pretty stuff.”
     Stone Seafood is inspected regularly by the county health department, and Stone says it’s not unusual for him to spend several hours a day making sure the shop is clean. “One of the comments I get most often is that our market doesn’t smell bad, and that’s what I want,” he said. “At some seafood markets the smell is so bad that you have to place your order and walk out while you wait.”
     While he never expected his business to blossom the way it has, Stone admits it’s where he’s most comfortable. He grew up getting to know fishermen, crabbers and shrimpers and watching them do their jobs, and he says he knows his suppliers so well that he can tell where anything in his market was caught, to within about 100 yards.
     “If you don’t get out there and learn, you can’t do it right,” he explained. “You have to know what they look like when they come out of the water.”
     If there’s one thing that keeps him going to work happy, Stone said, it’s the customers who trust him. “They’ll come in to buy one thing and then buy what I have and tell me, ‘I know whatever you’ve got is good.’
     “That’s the feeling that keeps me going. I do it all by word-of-mouth. I promise to keep the prices as low as I can and sell top quality fish. If you like it, tell somebody. That’s my philosophy.”