Truth in Advertising

My dad and I standing outside of our store just day's after the landslide in March 2020.

When I first took over the marketing for Tatsuda’s, my dad told me something he would repeat many times over the years:

“It’s important that we do what we advertise.”

At the time, he was talking about my excitement to promote our “excellent customer service.”

I remember feeling a flicker of defensiveness.

“Yes, I know, Dad,” I thought.

Of course we would do what we said we would do. That was obvious… wasn’t it?

It took me years to understand that he wasn’t just talking about delivering on a slogan.

He was talking about trust.

The trust we built with our customers didn’t come from a clever ad or a catchy tagline.

It came from consistency. How well we lived up to the words we printed on our signs, our receipts, and our hearts. Over a century in business, my family didn’t just build a grocery store. We built a relationship with a community. And the foundation of that relationship was trust—earned slowly, protected fiercely, and tested often.

My relationship with my dad was rooted in the business. He wasn’t a man of many words, but when he spoke, it mattered. As I took on more responsibility, he gave me the freedom to try, to fail horribly, and to learn deeply. But through every mistake and victory, he always circled back to one thing:

Trust takes time to build and seconds to break.

And once broken, it may take years—if ever—to rebuild.

I learned that lesson the hard way after the landslide.

I made a decision about how community donations that were meant to support our team were distributed that hurt members of my team. Some forgave me; some didn’t. I worked to repair what I could, but some fractures never healed. At the same time, I learned how it feels when others break your trust—how it can make you question not only them, but yourself.

It was a painful lesson, layered on top of an already life-altering loss. But it taught me something essential about leadership, integrity, and humanity:

Trust is not a marketing strategy.

It’s a relationship—one that requires truth, humility, and consistent action.

Because words don’t matter if there isn’t follow-through.

Promises mean nothing without proof.

And trust, once broken, is one of the most difficult things to repair.

My dad taught me many lessons over the years.

But the lesson on trust—

the one hidden inside that simple idea,

“Do what you advertise”

not just in business, but in life,

was the most important of them all.