Preserving general stores, the heart of small towns
Opening day at the Way Way Store in Saco, Maine, is always cause for celebration. After a long winter, customers pour in to get their first taste of spring, like Sugar Daddies. "I wanted to be the first customer of the year, for good luck," said Alex.
For the past decade or so, these visits have felt especially sweet. For a while, everyone thought this store had closed for good. "It was gone, it was sad," said Peter Scontras. "It was like an old friend had died."
Scontras grew up in Saco. The Way Way Store originally operated as a country general store. Back then, it was considered "way way" out of town, and it was run by the same family for nearly a century. When it closed down in 2003, it sat empty for eight years, until Scontras and his wife, Bridget, both retired teachers, reopened the store as a labor of love.
"It was a treasure," said Scontras, "and it had to be taken away from them to really understand it and appreciate it, to get to the point of a greater appreciation of what this was."
In the community of Albany, Vt., a 2013 fire forced their general store to close. "It was a real loss for our community," said Kristin Urie. "It was a hole."
Urie and her neighbors felt the absence immediately, but any new owner hoping to make a profit was scared off by the high renovation costs. Today, Albany's store – the Genny – is thriving again, run by partners Emily Maclure, Kit Basom and Jana Smart. The women already owned a successful store in the nearby town of Craftsbury, but in the case of Albany, the community now owns the building. "This is Albany's store, and we're operating it," said Maclure. "And I think that's the key to success in this kind of business."
The Albany Community Trust raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase and renovate the store, utilizing everything from grant applications to pie auctions. "This is a place that says that this is a town, right? There's a there there," said Ben Doyle, the president of the Preservation Trust of Vermont. The group has been helping towns take charge of their local stores to ensure they survive.
Doyle said, "We want to be able to go to a store where the people running it know who we are, they know what we like, and they offer something that we can buy, and that sense of community that you can't buy."
That sense of community is alive and well at the Genny. They sell local staples and sandwiches, but people are coming for more than just convenience. Smart said, "Maybe somebody doesn't really need something from the store, but they're like, 'Ah, I'm just gonna pop in and, like, get a thing.' But it's not about the thing; it's about, like, the people and the connection, and sense of place, and community."
The general story of rural general stores is not necessarily a happy one. Unless you've got someone doing it purely for the love of it, it's a hard road for young entrepreneurs. Which is why the locally-supported model may offer a path forward – a community deciding there is a value to a having a store that goes beyond the bottom line.
Maclure said that is what is happening, trying to hold onto Main Streets: "Hold on to these places that actually do bring people together, that it's not another Dollar General, that it's not a big box store, that actually there's a heart."
For more info:
- Way Way General Store, Saco, Maine
- The Genny General Store, Albany, Vt.
- Albany Community Trust
- Preservation Trust of Vermont
Story produced by Sari Aviv. Editor: Remington Korper.
See also:
- A store owner gets just the help he wanted ("Sunday Morning")