The owners of a Dixon family-owned grocery store, Oliver’s Corner Market, started placing items on sale Monday as they prepare to close after 39 years of operations.

Tim and Patty Oliver opened the store at 748 N. Brinton Ave. in Dixon on May 18, 1987, but are now looking to retire. The couple told Shaw Local they’ve found a potential party that’s interested in the building, and their store will close when their remaining inventory runs out, by April 4 at the latest.

“We’ve watched a lot of other people our age in small businesses have a hard time with succession...so when the opportunity presented itself, we had to take it, because there may not be another one,” Patty said.

“I think I’m gonna miss our customers the most. I love talking to them, and I feel bad for them because they depend on us,” Tim said.

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Patty and Tim Oliver are calling it a career and closing Oliver’s Corner Market in Dixon. (Alex T. Paschal)

Oliver’s was known for processing its own meat and, up until the last few years, made a majority of dishes, such as salads, from scratch. Its buffet-style salad bar was also a big hit, the couple said.

“We were just kids,” Patty said of when she and Tim first opened Oliver’s.

The two of them were working at a since-closed grocery store on Third Street in Dixon, which is also where they met, when the building that would become Oliver’s came up for sale. It was another grocery store at the time, and the warehouse that supplied it knew the couple was in the business, so they called to ask the couple if they wanted to buy it, Patty and Tim said.

“We were like, ‘We have no money,’ ” Patty said, but “they backed us.”

With additional help from a partner and that partner’s in-laws lending them the start-up cash, the building was theirs, Patty said.

“I was nine months pregnant. We had a baby on Friday and opened the store on Monday,” Patty said. “It was quite a weekend. I sent him flowers from the hospital bed.”

After they opened Oliver’s, their upstairs office space also functioned as a playroom for their younger kids who came to work with them, Patty said, adding that her “favorite memory is family.”

The couple said all six of their children have worked at Oliver’s, along with five of their grandchildren, around 30 nieces and nephews, and many other relatives.

“It’s kind of a rite of passage in the family... to go work for Uncle Tim and Aunt Patty,” Patty said.

Tim singled out three in particular: their nephew Chris VanHorn, who worked for them for 35 years, and his wife Rachel VanHorn, who’s worked 30 years, and the couple’s sister-in-law, Asami Burke, who’s worked 25 years.

“Having them made our jobs easier,” Tim said.

As a small business owner, “your time isn’t your own,” Patty said. She said there was “scary stuff that’s happened over the years, but we survived it.”

Tim said that when owning a grocery store, there’s so much refrigeration involved. Anytime they lost power during a major storm, they risked losing their product.

“There was times I would come in here at midnight and check our equipment to make sure everything was running,” Tim said.

“We’re not big enough for a whole store generator, so Tim was our generator,” Patty said.

The two of them combined have almost 102 years in the grocery business, Tim said with a laugh, adding, “That’s enough.”

Now retiring, the couple said they’re most looking forward to traveling, playing golf and spending time with their grandchildren.

“It’s been a good life,” Patty said, and Tim agreed: “A very good life.”