The popular grocery store Tony’s Market in Oak Bluffs will be coming under new management by an off-Island company.
On Tuesday, the Oak Bluffs select board unanimously approved the transfer of an annual wine and malt alcohol license from Cottage Market Place Corp.
Sumanbhai Patel is the new owner, who also owns several businesses in Massachusetts, including Rory’s Market in Dennis. While his son is a part of the ownership group that owns Our Market in Oak Bluffs, this is Sumanbhai Patel’s first business on Martha’s Vineyard.
Although under new ownership, Oak Bluffs officials were assured that Islanders will still be seeing the services they’re used to at the nearly 150-year-old store on 119 Dukes County Ave., according to the business’ attorney.
“The operation is going to be the exact same,” Gregory Demakis, the applicant’s attorney, said. They will keep the existing employees, hours, and name.
There was some confusion during the meeting regarding ownership of the liquor licenses in Oak Bluffs.
Board members scrutinized whether there were any relations between Patel and the Oak Bluffs liquor store Our Market, where owners of the building share the same surname. Also, board member Dion Alley also asked whether New Jamaica Plain Realty LLC, a Sharon-based company managed by Mitesh Patel, from which Sumanbhai Patel drew $200,000 as a part of financing the Tony’s Market purchase, had any stake in Our Market. A state law restricts an entity to one liquor license per town.
Demakis underscored that not all of the Patels owning Island businesses are related. “Patel is a very common name,” he said.
Demakis also said he’d be “shocked” if Mitesh Patel had anything to do with the Oak Bluffs businesses, and that the Patels who own Our Market have “nothing to do with” the liquor license. Still, he clarified that Tapan Patel, one of the owners of Our Market, is Sumanbhai Patel’s son.
The questioning also stemmed from initial “confusion,” as board chair Gail Barmakian put it, of whether it was a single family owning multiple liquor licenses in the town. Barmakian and Alley were concerned that if an issue arose and a family member left, it would cause other members of the family to also leave the Island.
The owners of Our Market also own Your Market in Edgartown, under a separate limited-liability company.
Even if they were related, Demakis said, he’s worked with various Patels for more than two decades, and that a situation in which multiple stores were abandoned in a municipality has never happened.
He also noted a trend of Indian business owners buying local stores across the state. “A lot of the people who are getting old and retired and want to sell, and want to move off into the sunset, the only people who buy these types of stores, most of them are Indians,” Demakis said.
And so continues the trend of seeing another island business not staying in the hands of islanders but being taken over by off island investors. This is happening on the Cape, as well.
Off islander’s are more efficient (DOGE).
Long live capitalism…
That’s pretty funny. Our kids can’t buy houses, now that can’t own a business. So many thousandaires shilling for the billionaires.
Your kids can buy houses and businesses.
They are sold to the highest bidder.
The Joy of Democratic Capitalism.
If we were true a Communism no one could buy houses or businesses.
one should also consider that many of the island businesses/properties that are owned by “islanders” are consolidated into the hands of a very select group of uber-affluent islanders who leverage their success/affluence to monopolize the limited available resources. this has the same effect of barring access to those less affluent islanders/others who desire to own property or start and run businesses. capitalism has the same rules on island as elsewhere and for on island investors as it does for off island investors. as in, the (island) rich get richer, and the island poor…