Back-to-school shopping at a back window
With summer half way over, Jerusalem’s Intercol is ready to help anxious parents with textbooks and supplies
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
One of Jerusalem’s best-kept secrets isn’t all that impressive from the outside.
Lotto posters line the metal doors, and like many corner stores, the entrance is cluttered with freezer chests full of ice cream popsicles and shelves lined with sundry items, from deodorant and cigarettes to an array of candy and the latest tchochkes desired by the under-ten set (Minions, anyone?).
It’s also where Jimmy Ben Sadon, one of the two owners of Intercol, as the shop is called, spends most of his time, ringing people up at the cash register. He helps out the customers, finding the latest price of a new HP printer for one regular, and printing out a series of lottery tickets for another.
But the back part of Intercol is where the real action is.
“Just give me the sheet and we’ll get it all for you,” said Uzi Nigri, Ben Sadon’s long-time business partner, who’s being aided on this Thursday in late July by his son and teenage daughter.
The sheet Nigri is referring to is the printout that many of the parents come in clutching in their sweaty hands, listing the textbooks, workbooks and notebooks, as well as supplies, that must be purchased in preparation for the start of school on September 1.
Israel’s public schools are mostly free, but it’s the parents who pick up the tab for nearly all the school supplies. Crossing off the items on the list is an overwhelming task, but the Intercol owners have it down to a science.
Parents pony up to the window at the back of the store, where Nigri and his son take each list and pull out the texts listed from the comprehensive library they’ve compiled over the last 33 years.
Secular or religious schools, Arab or Jewish, they stock every book required for local schools, and if they don’t, Nigri scrawls the store’s phone number on the list and tells the parent to call back in a few days to check if it’s in.
On the other side of the window are the school supplies, stacks of lined and unlined notebooks, every kind of pen, pencil, glue, marker, highlighter and eraser, not to mention the pencil cases, backpacks and art supply bags.
“There were no bookstores like ours when we opened,” said Ben Sadon.
The two opened Intercol in 1982, when they were both just out of the army and looking for a business they could grow together. They started out with toys, candy and school supplies, the kinds of items people always pick up when they head to the corner store.
With time, they began carrying the standard school books required by most local schools, and realized they’d hit upon a niche.
“There was a huge demand,” said Ben Sadon. “No one else provided everything and if they did, they didn’t know how to do it with care.”
Now the pair supply books to schools as well as other institutions, and operate a brisk used book business, offering parents the option to sell back textbooks at the end of each year.
“This is really a family business, we all work here, my wife, our kids,” said Ben Sadon, who, like Nigri, offers his help on a regular basis.
“Profits are small in the book business,” he noted. “We have to do it all because if we paid managers and staff, we wouldn’t make much of a profit. So we make a big push in July and August, because this is our season.”
Intercol, 4 Berl Luker Street, Pat, Jerusalem.
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