Yankee Notebook: 'Little-box' stores fill every need
Toolbox
Published: May 20, 2007
Most small New England villages have country stores — one apiece, as a rule, and pretty much, along with the church, the center of community life and news. In the rare instance of a village with two stores, one will invariably look more prosperous than the other. And if one of them has the local post office in the back of the store, there's no question which will come out on top.
So it was a surprise to many people that in a northern village with two stores, the one with the post office seemed to do less business. Somebody once asked one of the local old-timers how that could be.
"Well," the old fellow said, "Ralph ain't got the post office, and he ain't exactly the neatest feller in the world, and his prices ain't any cheaper. But he's got a short-weight scale over there, which not everybody knows. So when you go in to buy, say, a pound of cheese, he weighs up a pound on that short-weight scale. Then he winks at you and throws on an extra slice or two."
It's hard to imagine anybody who doesn't love country stores. They're rarely elegant; just keeping store takes the proprietor so many hours that there's no time left for keeping up the store. So the old tongue-and-groove porch boards are often worn away in little v-shaped cracks between the boards; the front door may stick when you try it; and inside, the softwood floor often has been worn away by generations of shoes and boots, leaving the old nail heads sticking up and shiny.
But the aromas — of Bag Balm, kerosene, of chili cooking behind the cold meat counter — are as unforgettable as irresistible.
You can tell a lot about a village by its store. In some, you get greeted when you walk in as a stranger; in others, you get looked at. In some, you can get a great conversation going by commenting on somebody's Red Sox or Yankees cap; in others, the response implies that as a stranger — and probably a flatlander, at that — you have no status for such intimacies. When that happens, I follow St. Paul's advice, and shake the dust of that village (or in New England, the mud) from my feet.
The late Al Foley, a Dartmouth history professor, Vermont legislator and, most famously, a Vermont storyteller described the hard time he once had trying to get a conversation going with a bunch of old-timers on the porch of the Barnet country store. In frustration, he finally said, "You fellas don't talk much, do you?"
"No," was the response. "We don't believe in talkin,' 'less we can improve on the silence." Professor Foley never returned to that store, but he took away a story.
Mother and I agree that a perfect country store ought to offer the following: prepared food and sandwiches for people on the run or picking up a lunch on the way to work; ordinary groceries, canned food and bread; household stuff like Scotch tape, clothes pins and spiral notebooks; gas pumps and a kerosene tank; hunting and fishing licenses; notions and gewgaws for impulsive shoppers and tourists; greeting cards for most occasions; and coffee early in the morning at a reasonable price. (Starbucks would wither out here. Can you imagine a logger or turkey hunter ordering a latté?) Little loss leaders like low-priced coffee can often lead customers who first came to dip their toes into the water to become steady patrons.
Most of all, the country store needs a proprietor or two who really enjoy people: gregarious extroverts who derive their energy from the all-day chitchat of dozens, even hundreds of customers, each with his unique information, concerns, stories and style.
From the early-morning rugged guys driving muddy pickups and headed for work, to the slightly later early-rising retirees coming in for a newspaper, to school kids getting out of the cold while they wait for the bus, to the parents picking up groceries for supper on the way home from work, the storekeeper — like the pastor, priest or bartender — knows them all. He can just listen, or he can bat the ball back and forth.
Most of all, if he's good, he makes each patron feel as though he's probably the store's most important customer.
On my way across Vermont most mornings, I stop faithfully at the Waits River General Store. The coffee is ready early and inexpensive, the clientele are as friendly as the proprietors, Bill and Donna MacDonald, and Mrs. MacDonald makes a killer ham-and-cheese on rye with everything. The pleasure and the sandwiches, unfortunately, will end when Mother and I follow our bed to East Montpelier, but the memories will linger on.
Bill apprised me of a recent phenomenon among country stores: They've gone modern! The stores themselves, and their merchandise and ambiance, may remain the same, but they've now got Web sites.
You can go to vaics.org and get a complete list of all the members of the Vermont Alliance of Independent Country Stores, along with a map showing the location of each member store, its list of offerings, all the local attractions ("the second most photographed church in New England"), and even photos of the stores, their interiors and the proprietors.
The cracker barrel and potbellied stove may be things of the past, and improved mobility may be a threat to the old-fashioned store. It may be harder every year to find young people willing to put in the long hours necessary to make a living at it. Still, I never spy a country store coming up but I feel like a traveler in the desert spotting date palms growing green around an oasis.
Willem Lange is a writer, storyteller and retired contractor who lives in New Hampshire. His column appears each week in the Living section of the Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus. He can be reached through his Web site, willemlange.com.
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