Thinking that farming might fill his need for great food, he bought a farm in Ohio in 1978.
"Every year I would take two weeks off and come back and help out for the Christmas season," he said. "Then I started coming back the day before Thanksgiving and I would stay through the new year."
His helping hand soon turned into a full-time job: When his father retired, Cardullo bought the store and took control at the beginning of 1993.
Though the store was full of family memories, it was going through an identity crisis. Helping it beyond that was Cardullo's first order of business.
"One problem was that when I started, Cardullo's really lacked an identity. People didn't know what we did," he said. "We have an Italian name but at that time we sold mostly German products."
Another challenge was to bring the store into the technology era--when Cardullo bought the store, there wasn't even a calculator in it. So he amassed a database of the store's products, which let him administrate more efficiently.
But Cardullo said he tried to keep the family atmosphere and devoted staff that his father established.
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