105 Market House
513.621.2570

As the daughter of Findlay Market merchants, Jean Bender has known the market her entire life. Bender's Meats offers a full line of lunch meat and fresh pork products, from chops to ribs. Her specialty is locally-made Schad's ham. She thinks theirs is the best, because ham is the only product they make.

Jean's parents, Alice and Chink Geiger, are the founders of the Amish poultry stand at Findlay Market. It was called Geiger's Country Corner, and it is still in business today as Busch's Country Corner. (The name changed in 1997, when Jean's stepson, Mike Busch, took over the family business.) Chink Geiger started in the poultry business at age 13, working at the Sixth Street Market in downtown Cincinnati. By the time Jean was that age, she was helping her father at Findlay Market. The Geiger's had their own poultry house and Jean first worked on the process line preparing fresh chickens for market.

Jean became a Findlay Market merchant herself when another family business, Rothhaus Meats, came up for sale in 1975. It was the stand right next to Geiger's. When Jean bought the stand, she was an employee at AT&T and she continued to work there on weekdays while her in-laws, Jack and Loraine Bender, ran the stand for her. On Saturdays, Jean worked at Findlay Market and, one year later, she left AT&T to become a full-time market merchant.

Today Bender's Meats serves four generations of customers. She's known some of them since they were babies. She can remember weighing them on her scale for their parents. Now those people have babies of their own.

When you get to know your customers that well, it's like being a bartender. There's more to the business than just the transactions, Jean says. You know your customers' lives, and even their children's lives. When a customer dies, Findlay Market is never the same for Jean. Many of her customers show up at the same time every week. Once they're gone, so is what made that particular time of day special.

As a Findlay Market merchant, Jean works long hours doing physically demanding work. She says it's hard to be there, but then it's hard to be away. After the market's closed for a couple of days she's always ready to go back.

She has other family ties at the market besides Busch's Country Corner. Her sister-in-law Cheri has worked for her ever since she bought the business. Her stand was where brother-in-law Mike Bender had his first job. Mike's also a market vendor. He's owned Mike's Meats since 1985.