Vince and Margie Perry dont live at the North Pole, but on Christmas Eve they and a dozen volunteer helpers become extremely busy.


Thats when the Perrys, owners of Williams Seafood Market & Wines, in Spokane Valley, sell about 6,500 pounds of crab that they crack and clean, plus large quantities of other seafood and wine, from their small store behind Freds Appliance at 10627 E. Sprague.


Owners since 1989 of a business that launched in 1942, the couple run the store six days a week, only receiving help occasionally from a son, and from friends the two days before Christmas, when business peaks, says Vince Perry.


He says the 1,800-square-foot store stocks 287 different seafood items and has 980 different wines. Prices of unusual items range as high as $50 for a 2-ounce tin of American sturgeon caviar to $190 for a bottle of Cristal Brut French champagne.


My seafood list is extensive, and I try to stay away from grocery-store wines, says Perry. I buy the most expensive wines.


And the aisles arent even tight.


Entering the front door from the U-City North Shopping Center, Williams Seafood boasts a 36-foot long display case and service counter on the left that holds 90 types of fresh and frozen seafood, ranging from one-pound Alaskan crab legs to swordfish to various sizes of oysters, says Perry. Vince and Margie normally work behind the counter. Among the items displayed on the wall behind them are an extremely large mounted crab and an advertisement for lutefisk thats available year-round.


Directly facing the front door is a long, narrow, two-sided display of wines that includes 475 different Washington wines, plus others from around the world, he says. Vince Perry didnt used to drink wine, but since Williams Seafood elected to drop most of its wholesale seafood business in 1994 and replace that lost revenue with wine sales, he now tastes every wine before selling it.


I taste all 980 wines, he says. I have to sample the wine to know if I want to put it on the shelf. If it doesnt taste right, Im not going to sell it.


To the right of the door are displays of miscellaneous canned goods, spices, and fish batters, and a cooler filled with pop, beer, and water. To the rear along that wall is a 20-foot- long freezer that holds another large assortment of seafood ranging from two-pound lobster tails to five sizes of calamari (squid), to an assortment of boxed fish products imported from Reykjavic, Iceland.


In the stores back room is a 7-foot-high smoker in which Perry routinely smokes salmon, halibut, catfish, and trout. On request, Williams Seafood will smoke most kinds of fish other than red snapper and sole, which Perry says are too thin for smoking and come out with a rubbery texture.


Theres also a much larger freezer, 14 by 8 feet by 10 feet tall, in the back room thats used to store more seafood, he says.


Perry says most of the more-common seafood items he sells are grocery-store priced. Yet, many of the specialty fish items he sells are bought in smaller quantities, necessitating numerous freight charges from Seattle and often from suppliers even farther away, thus boosting the price, he says.


He laments that he no longer can buy Russian caviar, which, if he could get it, would cost Williams Seafood $250 for one ounce.


Williams Seafood sells 19 sizes of shrimp and six sizes of lobster, with the largest of each selling for about $29 a pound.


From a small freezer behind the display case Perry pulls out 4-ounce packets of California abalone that sell for $39.50. And we sell them, adds Margie.


Vince Perry says about 85 percent of the seafood arrives frozen and remains frozen until its sold. Thats to give his customers a better product, he says.


The company, which had revenue of about $500,000 last year, regularly also has fresh salmon, snapper, sole, cod, halibut, and tuna for sale in its display case. If he can detect any odor to the fresh fish, its immediately frozen and sent to the Union Gospel Mission, where he encourages the charity to make soup with the fish, says Perry.


Other seafood items carried in the store and not commonly found elsewhere here include monkfish, Chilean sea bass, mussels, and baby octopus, he says.


Wines


Wine sales now amount to about 30 percent of the companys revenue, and much of its wine is sold by the case, Perry says. Giving customers the opportunity to mix and match the 12 bottles they buy to create such a case, Williams Seafood sells cases at wholesale prices, plus 10 percent, he says. That compares with a 25 percent markup when bottles of wine are purchased individually.


Some wines are only available to the small seafood and wine outlet in limited amounts each year. Perry says he was allowed to buy just four bottles of the $190 Louis Roederer Cristal Brut champagne this year, and was down to one bottle left for sale last week.


He says that in 1994 he got on a sales list for Leonetti Cellar, a winery in Walla Walla he asserts made Walla Walla famous for wines after it launched in 1977, and is now only open to the public two days a year. Williams Seafood received 36 bottles of Leonetti Cellar wine to sell this year at $99.50 a bottle, and Perry elected to hold most of those bottles back to sell during the Christmas season. Until it was sold recently, he even had a vertical display box of six Leonetti Cellar wine bottles dated 1994 through 1999 that he priced at $700. You can pay up to $225 for a single bottle of Leonetti Cellar wine in Seattle, Perry says.


A 1942 start


Dick Williams opened the original Williams Fish Co. in 1942 in an old wholesale building at 1018 W. College, in Spokane. He sold fish both over-the-counter and wholesale for nearly 40 years, opening a second store in 1974 at 6418 N. Wall before his death in 1980.


Perry went to work for Williams Fish Co. only two weeks before Williams died, and continued to work for his widow, Helen Williams, who changed its name to Williams Seafood. In 1981, the business opened the current Spokane Valley store, and continued to operate both stores and the warehouse on College for eight years.


Helen Williams, who ran the store in North Spokane and left Perry to manage the Valley store, sold the North Wall store to Margie Peterson in 1988 and the Valley store to Vince and Margie Perry in 1989, when she also closed the warehouse on College. Peterson closed the store on Wall in 1994.


That same year, Vince and Margie Perry changed the name of Williams Seafood to Williams Seafood Market & Wines.


Perry says when he bought the Spokane Valley store he sold seafood wholesale to about 100 customers, but quickly found that much larger suppliers, such as Pacific Seafood Co., of Mukilteo, Wash., Ocean Beauty Seafoods Inc., of Seattle, and others, were providing stiff competition. Now, Williams Seafood only sells seafood on a wholesale basis to a handful of customers.


In 1994, we basically dropped our wholesale business and turned our dollars into wine, Perry says.


Now, about 65 percent of the businesss revenue comes from seafood sales through the store, with 5 percent coming from what remains of the wholesale business, he says.