On a recent dark, winter afternoon in Strafford, a warm light emanated from an old, wooden building with a gas pump and mail collection box outside. It was snowing, but that didn’t stop a steady stream of customers from pulling their beat-up pickups, fancy SUVs, and 18-wheelers into the parking lot. Everyone in town relies on Coburns’ General Store.
Inside the store, Chrissy Jamieson worked the checkout, chit chatting as customers bought hamburger meat, beer, cat food, and cheese. One customer excitedly told Jamieson that she had just put up her Christmas tree.
Jamieson’s parents, Sue and Melvin Coburn, have owned this store for 47 years. It’s the definition of a one-stop shop — there’s a post office and bank inside, a laundromat in the basement, a meat counter and dried goods galore.
The Coburns are ready to retire, and their daughter wants a job with better hours. They put the store on the market a few years ago, but didn’t get any good offers.
“You’re talking 12-, 13-hour day total and everything,” said Melvin Coburn, who is 80 years old. “Six days a week, it adds up after a while. But I tell people it, you know, it doesn’t seem like a job to me, because I just love it so much.”
To save the general store, a group of locals has set up a nonprofit community trust. Their plan is to buy the store and then lease it out to a store operator. Under this model, Coburns’ has to be locally-run — it can’t be turned into apartments or sold to a chain. That’s really important to Lauri Berkenkamp, a trust board member and Strafford resident.
“Going to Coburns’ is my social outlet,” said Berkenkamp, who works from home. “My kids are adults now, and they can come back and see people, run into their teachers and people that they knew when they were kids. And it’s like our town’s living room in a way.”
Teenagers often get their first job at the store, and second-homeowners cross paths with dairy farmers. To work there, you have to have good people skills.
“You got to be able to connect with all walks of life, not just certain people,” said Sue Coburn. She’s 79, and the store has been part of her life since her early 30s. “We get all kinds — young, old, farmers, high society. So you got to be able to treat them all the same.”
Trudi Brock, the president of the nonprofit’s board, said the Coburns have “their fingers on the pulse of the community. Whenever there’s any need in the community, they’re there. And I think that’s something you don’t get at a Maplefields or 7-Eleven where people get gas and they get coffee, beer and cigarettes or whatever and go on their way. People walk into Coburns’ and generally hang around,” she said.
The nonprofit needs about $1.8 million to buy the store and pay for repairs (the building is more than 100 years old). One of the first people to donate to the effort was Lauri Berkenkamp’s son Noah Kahan, the Grammy-nominated singer songwriter. He featured Melvin Coburn’s voice in the extended version of his song “The View Between Villages” on his hit album “Stick Season.”
This “community-supported enterprise” model, as it’s called, has worked well for stores in other Vermont towns, including Putney, Gilford, Shrewsbury, Albany, Elmore, and East Calais. The Preservation Trust of Vermont helps towns establish trusts. Ben Doyle, its president, said the model helps young, motivated proprietors get into the business without having to drop a ton of money upfront.
“It’s really, really tough to make a go of it in a general store in rural communities these days,” he said. “There’s a ton of deferred maintenance, and the margins are really, really small.”
And sometimes, running a store isn’t what the operator envisioned. If they want out, the store will stay a store, and the trust will just lease it to another person.
Despite the long hours and slim margins, Melvin Coburn still loves working at the store. He can’t really imagine life without it. He even said he’d be willing to work for the new hours a few days a week after he retires.
“If a position was available, and they needed some help,” he added.
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