The Benson General Store was the kind of place you would go to pick up a roll of paper towels and leave hours later, having enjoyed a long conversation with a neighbor you hadn’t seen in weeks. It was the post office, the gas station, the grocery store, the food shelf, the bus stop and the watering hole.
“It was the beating heart of our village,” said Linda Peltier, who has lived for 43 years in Benson, a quiet farm town of 974 in northern Rutland County.
Then, in 2019, the store burned down. The impact was devastating. “People were crying in the street,” Peltier remembered.
In the years since, residents have gotten used to commuting 40 minutes round-trip to get groceries — but they haven’t adjusted to losing the store where much of the town’s communal life took place.
The story isn’t over. Peltier and her friend Jean McKeever founded the Benson General Store Community Enterprise in 2023 to rebuild the burned-down store. They’ve assembled a committee of 29 supporters, won a $475,000 grant to get started, raised $45,000 in donations and have plans for a capital campaign. Their goal is to break ground this year.
“I don’t feel like we’re doing this alone,” Peltier said. “We’re part of a cohort of Vermonters revitalizing general stores.”
The traditional role of the general store has been staunchly utilitarian: to sell groceries and dry goods — essentials — and turn a profit for the owners. Modernity has threatened that model. Storekeepers must contend with aging buildings that require expensive upkeep, the difficulties of succession planning, the challenges of keeping prices low in rural places and the ease of online shopping — why stop by the general store when one can order paper towels with the click of a button? Many owners can no longer count on earning a good living from their 60-hour workweeks — a recipe for burnout.
These days, it can even be hard to define exactly what a general store is. By generous definitions, Maplefields or Dollar General might qualify. On the other end of the spectrum are more tourist-oriented places such as the Warren Store.
Certainly, general stores are places where one can buy necessities. (“If we don’t have it, you don’t need it” said a sign that hung for years in the window of Wayside Country Store in West Arlington.) More than that, when general stores are done right, they’re places that residents feel belong to them. So, as Peltier said, in recent years when an owner has announced that a village store may close, communities often step up to keep the place open.
The examples are myriad: When Buxton’s Store in Orwell announced in October that it would shut its doors after 57 years in business, residents started fundraising to reopen the store as a community-supported enterprise. Katie and Kyle Clark of electric aviation company Beta Technologies stepped in to save the Lincoln General Store last fall. And in Strafford, Lauri Berkenkamp, mother of singer-songwriter Noah Kahan, is helping lead a community effort to purchase Coburns’ General Store.
To survive, the new owners bring change to their shelves — whether that’s adding new products, such as a community thrift shop above the West Townshend Country Store, or events like wine tastings at Pierce’s Store in North Shrewsbury.
One thing is apparent: Vermont’s 70 remaining general stores are precious to their communities, and they won’t be allowed to disappear without a fight.
“You can’t go into the Craftsbury General Store and not feel a little tinge of, Oh, I wish I lived here,” said Ben Doyle, president of the Preservation Trust of Vermont, which has helped about 10 towns sustain their general stores through community-supported enterprises.
That sense of collective ownership, of shared space and intent, is a critical part of the general store formula — and of what is at stake for communities.
“They’re one of the last great egalitarian places we have,” Doyle said.
Seven Days reporters visited a sampling of these places across the state. Each spot has adopted a different approach to keeping the business afloat and offers a distinct look at what it takes for general stores to stay alive in the modern age — and why it’s so important that they do.
Ultimately, general stores offer something rare in these isolating times: a place to do the messy, mundane and often profound work of being neighbors.
— Rachel Hellman
Cooperative Community
Pierce’s Store, North Shrewsbury
The phone rings a lot at Pierce’s Store. Shrewsbury residents call to find out if the plow has come through yet or if a particular item is in stock. Some just ask for Martha. (Cell service in town is pretty bad.)
Personal phone calls are usually frowned upon while working. But it’s easier to get away with when you’re a volunteer, as many are at the circa-1865 general store in North Shrewsbury. Volunteer labor supplements the six paid staff, with community members doing everything from running the register to cutting fish. Everybody pitches in — the same spirit that brought the store back to life 15 years after the Pierce family closed its doors in 1993.
When Marjorie Pierce died in 2001, she bequeathed the store to the Preservation Trust of Vermont with the goal that it would once again serve the town. Using the Adamant Co-op as inspiration, a group of roughly 25 residents worked with the trust to form the Shrewsbury Cooperative at Pierce’s Store and reopened in 2009. By the end of its first year, the co-op had 175 members. Today, it’s 181 and still growing. At least 10 work regular shifts; others help with trash removal and plowing.
Membership costs $20, same as when the co-op began. Members’ product requests — from a particular brand of beer to canned mushrooms — inform what general managers Elena Gleed, 28, and Harry DiPrinzio, 29, stock. The old sign out front says “W.E. Pierce Groceries,” and the shelves are mostly that, with a small yet diverse selection — including mayonnaise, bulk spices, frozen rabbit meat, Shrewsbury’s Blueberries and an entire shelf of marshmallows — plus a smattering of essentials such as WD-40, Benadryl and New York Times-lauded maple fudge.
Everybody pitches in — the same spirit that brought the store back to life.
One morning in February, a group gathered in the store for Fish Friday — when 20 or so customers pick up a variety of fresh fish, all preordered and sold near wholesale price. The weekly event has happened for at least 15 years, Lavinia Seide said, and it makes for a busy day. She worked in the store’s small kitchen, portioning and weighing each order.
Throughout the day, other volunteers ran the register behind the long, low original counter, took deposits to the bank and offered feedback on lattes from the temporary espresso machine, procured for a pop-up the following day.
“I’m usually here at least once a week,” Jean Marie Walker said, ringing up items and marking the total on a customer’s account balance without needing to ask her name. A retired social worker, she moved to town five years ago and started volunteering not long after.
“I feel like I’m playing store,” Walker said, “and I get to socialize for a few hours.”
Larry Abelman, the 77-year-old retired retail director of Okemo Mountain Resort, is a former board member and current volunteer. He usually asks visitors if they know the tale of the moose who fell for a cow — a 76-day local love affair that made national news in 1986.
“I tell that story about four times every Saturday,” he said.
Events such as the espresso pop-up, annual chili cook-off, wine tastings and wood-fired pizza nights help draw folks to the store’s out-of-the-way location. And, at the encouragement of Sally Dyer Deinzer, a driving force in the co-op’s formation, managers Gleed and DiPrinzio urge people to “shop at Pierce’s first” before heading the 10 miles into Rutland for a major grocery store.
The couple are working with distributors to expand the store’s inventory and lower prices, turning it from an “emergency stop with prices to match” to a fully stocked grocery, Gleed said.
She and DiPrinzio, who both have extensive kitchen backgrounds, took over the store’s management last August. DiPrinzio was a teenager when Pierce’s reopened; back then, he sold his fresh pasta at the store.
Now, he makes Pierce’s sourdough bread, available by the loaf and in premade sandwiches. As he and Gleed think about how to get Pierce’s to a more sustainable economic model, expanding bread production— and even selling it to other stores — could help.
“But that’s a $15,000 investment for a new mixer and specialized oven,” DiPrinzio said, and it can be tricky to make changes in the historic building, which is still owned by the Preservation Trust.
That idea — and others, such as expanded shelving, a walk-in cooler, and an espresso or creemee machine — could be funded by a recent capital campaign, which will also help the store’s general operating budget. Like the initial call for investment when the co-op formed, the campaign was well received by the Shrewsbury community, raising $62,500.
“People are supportive of wanting the store, even if they don’t shop here all the time,” volunteer Helen Richards-Peelle, 72, said.
“It’s better than the empty building that sat here for 15 years,” Seide added.
— Jordan Barry
Food on the Shelves
Johnson General Store
Mike Mignone juggled his infant daughter from one arm to the other as he surveyed the former smoke shop that will soon become Johnson General Store. The 1,100-square-foot space was in varying states of work in progress: A replacement toilet sat near where a new oven would be installed; salvaged shelves lined one wall, ready to be filled; scrap plywood was stacked haphazardly in the future kitchen.
“We’ve just been scrambling,” said Mignone, who is opening the general store with his fiancée, Haley Newman, 30. With his salt-and-pepper beard and snapback hat, the 42-year-old looked the part of the New York City transplant that he is. “I think as long as we have food on the shelves, people will be happy,” he concluded.
He’s probably right. In the public imagination, Vermont general stores are hallowed for their role in creating community, as places where neighbors can count on running into one another and “there’s, like, six old dudes just standing around, drinking coffee for 20 minutes,” as Mignone put it.
But his project is a reminder that a general store’s reason for being is to serve a more fundamental need — for essential, accessible food. Johnson residents have been without a grocery store since 2023, when torrential flooding devastated the town and permanently closed Sterling Market.
Its absence has affected everyone, including Mignone, who lamented that later that day he’d have to drive to Morrisville — 30 minutes round trip — to get the tomatoes he needed. And he considers himself lucky. In Johnson, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the state, it can be a struggle for those without a car to shop for fresh, affordable food.
In fact, just 500 feet down the road, two older men — Richard Whittemore and Tom Foley — lamented the price of eggs while clutching coffees at the Maplefields gas station-convenience store, which offers a small assortment of groceries, though very little fresh produce.
“Everybody’s really excited about the general store,” Whittemore, who wore a “Make America Great Again” hat, told Seven Days. “We really need it pretty badly.”
Both the town and the village of Johnson have loaned Mignone money for the store. “One of the things that struck me was how community-minded Mike is,” said Randall Szott, the town’s community and economic development specialist. “We want to see this store be a success, given all of the struggles that we’ve had since the flood.”
Mignone said he’s relied heavily on the Johnson community, which has offered all sorts of unsolicited help. A member of the town’s Food Access and Awareness Action Group launched a GoFundMe, raising about $4,000 for the store. A carpenter friend donated his time to install counters, and another plowed snow, free of charge. A battalion of twentysomethings helped clean out the space in exchange for 6-foot bongs and psychedelic posters — remnants of the space’s former life as a smoke shop.
“The support has been kind of overwhelming,” Mignone said. “Things get frustrating and discouraging, but then I have a conversation with somebody that puts me back on the path, and I remember how badly we need to get this project up and running.”
Mignone grew up in Manhattan as part of a restaurant family and spent much of his twenties working at bars and restaurants. He had always wanted to open his own place and came one step closer last fall, when he launched Hangry Mike’s food truck in Johnson.
When he moved to town 21 years ago, he didn’t have a car. He remembers walking to Grand Union, a grocery store that closed after Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, and “hearing people playing music on their porches and congregating,” he said. “This town used to be very, very vibrant.” He hopes his store will help bring back some of that vitality.
Mignone plans to offer a wide variety of affordable prepared foods and a balance of low-priced and local groceries. The challenge excites him. “This might sound weird, but I love inventory,” he said.
But first come renovations to the building — a few doors down from the Johnson Woolen Mills store on Main Street — which has been a bigger job than he expected.
“I knew building a store from the ground up would be difficult,” Mignone said. “But if I knew what it would really entail, I might have thought about it a little bit harder first.”
Nevertheless, he is already in conversations with the owner about buying the building someday. In the meantime, he is leasing the two-story structure, which has an upstairs apartment that he rents out as an Airbnb to help offset his costs.
Johnson General Store is planned to open by the end of March. But if Mignone can’t get the entire space ready by then, he intends to open a small grocery section. It won’t make him much money, he said, but it will make all the difference for his neighbors.
— R.H.
Living With Ghosts
Jericho Country Store
When Valerie Sodano bought the Jericho Center Country Store, which billed itself as “Vermont’s longest running store, in the heart of Jericho Center since 1807,” she knew what to expect from the 218-year-old building. Like the Timberholm Inn, the Stowe bed-and-breakfast she owned and operated until 2022, this one creaks and groans like a rusty hinge.
“And sometimes, the ghosts chime in,” said Sodano, 40, who lives upstairs with her 12-year-old daughter and has been awakened at night by what sounds like eerie voices and jingling keys.
Ghosts aren’t the only ones who feel that the building belongs to them. General stores provide locals with a sense of constancy and connection to the past — and each other. Some old-timers still call the store “Desso’s,” referring to Gerry and Lillian Desso, who owned it from the 1960s to 1990s. Soon after taking over from the St. Amour family, who ran the business on the village green for 22 years, Sodano realized how hard change can be in a small community. Even minor alterations, such as new shelves or a fresh coat of paint, can make waves.
“You need a sense of humor and a thick skin.” Valerie Sodano
The first change on her watch was major: Soon after she took possession in June, the U.S. Postal Service closed the store’s post office, which leveled a double whammy. Sodano lost the rent income as well as the foot traffic of more than 100 post office box owners who stopped in daily for their mail and who might also buy milk or eggs and a creemee.
Most people knew the closure wasn’t Sodano’s doing, even as they mourned the loss. Chuck Lacy, 68, who lives several doors away, said his elderly mother grieved when it disappeared. It had contributed to “her own sense of place,” he added.
Then Sodano began making her own changes, which included dropping the word “Center” from the store’s name for brevity when staff answer the phone. Some customers say they’re less bothered by that than by Sodano’s new offerings, which seem to them to cater more to tourists than locals.
Drawing on her background in marketing, Sodano brought in Vermont gift items — tote bags, coffee mugs, commemorative dish towels — for the out-of-town skiers who stop on their way to and from Bolton Valley and Smugglers’ Notch, and for the visiting soldiers who train at the nearby Ethan Allen Firing Range. That shift in focus meant dropping some previously available grocery staples. When you just need a lemon or some hydrogen peroxide, one regular said, you don’t want to drive five miles to the nearest supermarket.
Sodano also installed a digital register and reorganized the floor plan to brighten the aisles, improve customer flow, and provide more space for strollers and wheelchairs. She upscaled the wine offerings, added an oven for baked goods and expanded the deli menu. The store’s best-selling item is now a panini called the Vermonter, with ham, apples, honey mustard, onions, tomato and cheddar cheese.
When Sodano removed most of the antiques from the walls — vintage cookie tins, a candy scale, a black-and-white photo of Model T Fords parked outside — and repainted the shelves pink, it created more hubbub. Almost every day, a customer asked worriedly if she’d sold or tossed them. She hadn’t. Sodano had taken them upstairs to clean and was slowly putting them on display again.
How do customers feel about the changes now?
“They definitely dragged their heels a little bit at first, but people have come around,” said Easton Randall, 19, a college student who’s worked there for three years.
Not everyone is sold. Chris Cleary, a 48-year-old sculptor who lives within walking distance and still comes in regularly, misses the days when Jon St. Amour would call to let him know the night crawlers were in or the Moosehead beers were running low.
“The inventory has changed. It used to have all the country store staples,” he said. “Now, it’s more of a craft wine establishment.”
Sodano has accepted all the scrutiny with grace. As she learned from running the inn, “You need a sense of humor and a thick skin,” she said. “You’re in a fish bowl.”
On a recent Friday, two 25-year-old carpenters, Austin Jerome and Brody Snow, waited for their sandwiches by the deli counter. The men, who’ve been building a house in Jericho for months, come in twice a day for meals and snacks. Jerome described the burgers as “phenomenal.”
“It’s the only place around here that does hot food for lunch,” Snow added. When he found that the menu lacked the English muffins he wanted for breakfast, Sodano added them.
For his part, customer Lacy is rooting for her success.
“That store is the center of the village,” he said, pointing out that it was on the market for years. All general stores are “a game of nickels,” he added. If some change is required to survive, so be it.
— Ken Picard
A Tale of Two Stores
C Village Store & Deli and Craftsbury General Store
In the Northeast Kingdom town of Craftsbury, two general stores share the same road. With the help of a strong wind, Christmas tree farmer Steve Moffatt said, “You could almost spit the distance” between C Village Store & Deli and Craftsbury General Store. The former occupies a building that has hosted a shop for more than a century; the Genny, as the latter is nicknamed, is almost twice as old.
The Genny sits conveniently next to the post office, while C Village has gas pumps and the game reporting station. Both once carried hardware and opened before dawn for farmers and craftsmen, but they’ve changed with the times, as has Craftsbury itself. C Village stocks fishing worms beside Monster Energy drinks. The Genny carries Hill Farmstead Brewery beer and has a pair of kombucha taps.
“We’re the new Stowe,” observed Harry Miller, a 66-year-old builder and town lister who has watched property values climb.
C Village stocks fishing worms beside Monster Energy drinks. The Genny has a pair of kombucha taps.
Craftsbury’s roughly 1,300 residents are closely watching another recent change: In mid-January, the family that owned C Village for 17 years sold to out-of-staters who are originally from India. Transitions of beloved institutions always bring uncertainty, but several locals shared deeper concerns about how people might accept the new owners — “the racial stuff,” as Miller put it. Everyone is hoping for the best and that the sale won’t compromise Craftsbury’s unusual capacity to support two stores at a time when many rural communities struggle to hold on to one.
When asked how their small town has managed this feat, most locals credit the Craftsbury Outdoor Center. The year-round destination for cross-country skiing, sculling, running and cycling annually attracts tens of thousands of visitors, some of whom put down seasonal roots. More of those folks favor the Genny — as evidenced by many ski-booted customers on a recent Friday — but the town benefits broadly, and each store has carved its own slice of the expanded economic pie.
Together, the two stores employ about 30 people, a reason that Miller and Moffatt said they and many neighbors patronize both. “It reflects our commitment to supporting local jobs, local people in those jobs,” Miller said.
On February 21, Nancy Frohwein stopped by the Genny, as she usually does after picking up her mail. Clutching a container of kale salad and a banana, the 85-year-old said that during a recent snowstorm, she called the store for shoveling help and a customer soon volunteered. Though Frohwein frequents the Genny, she said she buys her eggs at C Village because she knows the guy who raises them.
Both stores run busy deli-bakeries pumping out sandwiches, pizzas, to-go meals and sweets. The Genny sells 1,000 salted brown butter-Belgian chocolate cookies a month. C Village bakers are known for pie. “My plumber loves the maple cream,” Miller said.
But the stores diverge to meet the community’s diversity of tastes. A customer will find an array of tobacco products behind the C Village counter but none at the Genny, where the shelves behind the register hold $30 bottles of pinot noir. The Genny also carries local apples and potatoes alongside organic mangoes. C Village sells bags of frozen peas near paper-wrapped burger meat.
“We’re just really different animals,” said Genny co-owner Emily Maclure, 45, who grew up in nearby Orleans and bought the store in 2012.
Maclure and her business partners, Kit Basom and Jana Smart, also operate the Albany General Store in a building leased from a community nonprofit. There, Maclure noted, “We are the store” — and they sell cigarettes.
C Village had been for sale for several years before the Patel family bought it for $474,233, according to the real estate listing. Wearing duck boots and an earpiece for his phone, which warbled a Bollywood ringtone, 24-year-old manager Nik Patel said he started working in his family’s store in Gujarat when he was 13. The family owns two Springfield, Mass., convenience stores. He said the Craftsbury store’s strong deli and “very good staff” appealed to them.
Soon after Patel arrived, Moffatt, the 57-year-old tree farmer who grew up buying candy from the store, said he came in to introduce himself. “If anybody’s willing to step up and do the work, I wish them all the success in the world,” he said.
So far, little has outwardly changed. Ten longtime employees still churn out cream pies, whip up steak-and-cheese subs, and grab packs of smokes for regulars without needing to be told the brand.
Miller and Moffatt, both former school board members, expressed concern about the expanded selection of vapes, including fruity flavors. Patel said he added more tobacco products and low-alcohol liquor nips because those sell briskly in Massachusetts. Phone chargers, another new item, are popular, said 17-year-old cashier Sage Sweeney, the former owners’ niece, before she fed a devoted regular — a pit-boxer-hound mix named Zeke — his daily ice cream sandwich. Patel watched, clearly tickled.
The dog belonged to Tony Jones, 62, one of Craftsbury’s three remaining dairy farmers. “I’m here all the time,” he said, and strongly recommended the raspberry crumb bars. He shops the Genny, too, for the “really cold Barq’s root beer.”
Iva Wright, 27, has worked in the C Village kitchen since she was 16 and said the sale was “nerve-racking,” partly because she’d never worked for anyone else but also because of the language barrier when she talks with Patel, who is still mastering fluent English. Front-end manager Tracy Washer, 40, keeps a yellow sticky note bearing phonetically spelled words in Gujarati so she can say hi to Patel’s mother on the phone. She bridges the cultural gap by gently teasing her boss about his long-distance girlfriend and how often his mom calls. “He’s like my little brother,” she said.
The new co-owner seems willing to listen and learn. “He can make pizza like no tomorrow,” Washer said. When kids came in after a bowling league win, staff explained that the previous owners donated pizzas to local teams. Patel gave the youngsters four pizzas.
The Patels’ purchase was likely motivated by some of the same reasons Maclure bought the Genny 13 years ago. It represented “staying power,” she said, and made money. To keep doing both is the perpetual challenge.
In their shared pursuit to serve Craftsbury, the Genny and C Village have historically had a mutually supportive relationship, which Maclure expects will continue. The stores cohost a July 4 block party for which they close down their road and cook a free barbecue dinner together. Patel said he’s excited for that.
— Melissa Pasanen
This Old Store
The Elmore Store
The Elmore Store dates back to the early 1800s and has always been a popular gathering place in the rural lakeside town north of Montpelier. The store had a number of owners over two centuries before it was purchased in 2021 by the Elmore Community Trust. That long history has revealed itself to the store’s new operators in surprising ways.
Becca and Tim Lindenmeyr, entrepreneurs who also run Farm Craft VT, a seed-to-soap herb farm in Shelburne, will lease the building, which they envision as a multiuse community hub. Tim, 53, grew up in Elmore and is acting as the general contractor for the store’s renovations. The building has been stripped to the studs and is being completely redesigned.
The renovation has unearthed artifacts from the floors and walls — signs of earlier times. For her next episode of “Stuck in Vermont,” airing Thursday, March 13, Seven Days senior multimedia producer Eva Sollberger met Tim for a tour and got to see some of the salvaged relics.
When the building reopens in late spring or early summer, it will have two public rooms upstairs: a coworking space and a wellness area for massage. The downstairs will serve as a general store and post office, but there will also be a public bathroom, a seating area with a view overlooking the lake and an expanded outdoor area that will include a creemee window.
Sollberger spoke with Seven Days about filming the episode.
How is the renovation going?
There were five people hard at work when I arrived — six if you include Tim Lindenmeyr, who was waiting on a cabinet delivery. The building was a hub of activity, and during our interview you can hear bursts from the compressor, table saw, hammers, drills and a nail gun.
Everything has been opened up, and three or four layers of old ceilings have been removed from the main level. The walls are lined with hand-split lath and pine sheathing. In some areas, you can see the majestic 4-by-8-inch joists that stretch 28 feet across the ceiling. Tim said these massive timbers reveal that the space has probably always been a general store. It was built to be an open room.
Upstairs, in addition to the two new public spaces, there will be an apartment that the Lindenmeyrs will occupy. Tim joked that this would make it easier for him to start the store’s coffee at 6 a.m.
What artifacts has Tim found?
In the walls and floors, he’s discovered a penny pipe, checks and ledger books from the 1920s, newspaper clippings from the Civil War, antique toys, a leather cup, metal signs, a “toilet soap” wrapper for a scent called “Love Among the Roses,” old tax returns, a whiskey bottle from 1897, and a chalkboard sign advertising 18 pounds of sugar for $1. As Tim said, “It’s quite a little time capsule.”
The Lindenmeyrs plan to display this treasure trove in the renovated space, which will hopefully remain a beloved community hub for another few centuries.
— Eva Sollberger
Gather Round
Wayside Country Store, West Arlington
If you want to know something in Arlington, somebody at the round table will have the answer.
Six mornings a week, locals ranging in age from 6 months to nearly 90 years pull up chairs — or a lap, for the youngest — inside the Wayside Country Store. They chat about hay supplies, real estate prices and who plows whose driveway.
“We try to stay away from politics,” Phil Sherwin said. The first time a newly elected state representative showed up, “everybody left,” he added.
The store went from ”Mom and Pop” to ”Mom and Mom and Mom.”
Phil, 89, and his sons Rich and Keith, both in their sixties, sat at the table on a recent Tuesday morning. Promptly at 9:30, Phil got up. His wife’s travel mug had been waiting to be filled for more than an hour.
“You can’t escape the conversation, but Mom will be looking for her coffee,” Keith said, adding, “I just try to get out before lunch.”
The red-painted general store is a beacon in West Arlington’s rural Battenkill River Valley, so classic that it could be the scene of a Norman Rockwell painting. (The artist famously lived across the covered bridge just down the road.) The Wayside represents the flip side of news about the closing, sale or failure of general stores: Over the past 41 years, the Tschorn family has been its steward, keeping its community spirit and creaky floors while adding air conditioning, cinnamon rolls and craft beer. Three generations now work behind the counter, with young members of the fourth nearby. Between the communal round table and the family presence, entering the Wayside feels like coming home.
Nancy Tschorn, 86, bought the circa-1850 store with her husband, Doug, in 1984. They were drawn to its location: 3.5 miles west of Arlington and Route 7, 3.5 miles east of the New York border, and half a mile to the road that goes to tiny Sandgate, where they lived.
“It’s the only place you could get ice cream and get home without it melting,” she joked.
Nancy calls herself the “official greeter” and owner of record now. She’s also the resident historian, evidenced by her 2021 book, The Wayside Story: A Look Back at the History of a Vermont Country Store. She works Sunday mornings, while the day-to-day operations fall to her daughter-in-law, Suzanne, 58, and Suzanne’s daughter, Chelsea, 35. Chelsea’s infant son, Miles, bounces near the deli case when he’s not adding his voice to the round-table conversation. Suzanne’s husband, Allan, provides legal and financial advice.
When Doug died in 2014, the store went from “Mom and Pop” to “Mom and Mom and Mom,” Nancy wrote in her book.
The family dynamic “isn’t trouble-free,” Nancy said, “but the troubles are fairly minor. We capitalize on people’s strong points and don’t worry too much about their weak points.”
Chelsea didn’t intend to run the store, though she’s been on payroll since 2003. She might have stayed in Rhode Island, where she studied business management in college, had she not met a local guy who brought her home in 2010. That relationship didn’t last, but she’s worked full time at the Wayside ever since.
One of Chelsea’s three sisters, 38-year-old Rachelle Durrschmidt, joined the staff two years ago. Their grandparents would never insist that a family member work at the store, Chelsea said, but there was always a job ready if someone wanted it. She’s taking a similar approach with her kids, though her older two had to help at the register as their daily math lesson during the pandemic.
It’s a challenging time for stores like theirs, Nancy said, “but we’re doing OK, and we’re all on the same page about how to remain viable.”
General stores always get stamped with the personality of their owners, she continued. She maintains a jewelry display, while Suzanne has shaped the organic food offerings and created a section for her handmade knitwear. The pharmacy and toy shelves — with four types of baby wipes and almost as many squirt guns — speak to Chelsea and Rachelle’s experience as moms of young kids.
But it’s just as important to respond to customer requests, big and small. To meet increased demand for prepared meals, the Tschorns built a new deli in 2018. That renovation moved the round table from a tucked-away spot behind the register to the heart of the store, where it belongs.
Different customers fill the table’s eight wooden seats at lunch, dining on deli sandwiches and bowls of chili. After school, kids sit and sort their penny candy — now $6.99 per pound. On Tuesday nights, Suzanne’s knitting group holds court.
The multigenerational model, the store’s location and its role as a community hub “are our magic mix,” Chelsea said.
“Some days we look at each other like, ‘So, when are we selling the store?'” she added with a chuckle. “But those are just the hard days.”
— J.B.
The original print version of this article was headlined “If We Don’t Have it, You Don’t Need It | Vermont’s general stores are essential. Here’s how they’re adapting to stay in business.”
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This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2025.
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