Driving along a favorite country road in Virginia last week, I saw an old Gulf pump, and an lighted OPEN sign that called me in. Someone had reopened the old Cumnor Store in the tiny King and Queen County, Virginia town of Cumnor. Life returns to paradise, I thought.
Cumnor is one of those forgotten American places, with less people living there than during Colonial times. Cumnor contains the store and a few white clapboard houses. It has two nearby churches, including the grand Mattaponi Baptist Church, which dates from 1734. The store sits on a roadside corner, so its closure basically meant that the town was closed, as it no longer had a post office.
I went in, and it was perfectly clean, with a few young folk who were working. While I was there in the afternoon, there was a whole menu of sandwiches and chicken, including the basics of BBQ, wings and tenders.
Cumnor, on Route 14, is the town closest to the burial grounds of my ancestral people. So I pay my respects, whenever I can. While no one in our family has lived in the area for over a century, I still call it a sort of “home” as so many ancestors of my same name are buried in the nearby churchyard at Mattaponi Baptist. They lived on surrounding farms in the next town, Stevensville. Even if I did not have a personal connection, is the perfect drive, as it is the last, and longest unspoilt road in the Tidewater region, with much history to stop and see.
The Cumnor Store reopened last fall. The staff told me that Mike Gibson, a local, had reopened it. It now has a Facebook page; Gibson runs a local logging and trucking company, apparently. While many such stores closed in the 1970s, the Cumnor Store remained open much later. I am certain the reopening was and is a labor of love for Gibson, as so many of these stores are in small towns that only remain towns because of the store.
Tourist attractions that locals love
While many of these stores have closed across the American countryside, some survived, and became attractions; Country Living lists the 25 most famous. The ones that did thrive paid attention to the era of the convenience store, which offered prepared foods and fountain drinks, and did not try to be the grocery store.
I grew up working in one of these stores; in 1979, my father purchased the Irvington Country Store in a resort town in the Northern Neck of Virginia, and transformed it from a straightforward grocery into a thriving local market, gourmet and otherwise. It was sold after my parents were divorced, to my great sadness, and later closed. It is now an office.
That store’s failure was not one of the market. Even today, there are many versions of these stores that work. They most easily work in high income areas; the Town Landing Market in Falmouth, Maine takes a gourmet approach in that seaside Maine suburb of Portland. In Boca Grande, Florida where I work, Kappy’s serves one end of the island in a new building, and the older Hudson’s Grocery serves the town from an old, cinder block traditional grocery store. Hudson’s recipe is offering premium meats and seafood, but also $1 sodas and takeout lunch for the many service workers on the island doing HVAC, electrical and yards. Off island, there is Cape Haze Convenience Store; it sells sandwiches out of a portable building and seafood specialties in the parking lot.
Selling to all is a recipe that makes these stores work. They must be equal in appeal to wealthy and working, and all in between. They also need to be comfortable spaces for women to visit; very often convenience stores are not friendly to both sexes.
Many local stores have been turned into museums. While there is nothing wrong with that, the mistake is that if the store is turned into a museum, it is missing the element that made it, namely the merchandise. Perhaps there is an opportunity for that?
What is the recipe? There is not an exact one. You need to be both essential to the local person, but yet cool enough to be a sort of attraction. That is not hard to do, as everyone loves something that is local and authentic.
Some of the aspects of these stores that work:
- Sell some nostalgia: You need the legacy of the old store that was there. In Boca Grande, Hudson’s has an old Gulf pump outside it, painted pink. When you go in, it all feels like continuity. The Cumnor Store also has a Gulf pump, in a nice coincidence.
- Offer vintage foods: Most of the general stores that work have old-style items by the counter, and a rack of Tastykake or Hostess somewhere nearby. These products have the added benefit of selling well as they add a bit of nostalgia. Candy is also a way to hit a nostalgia button. At the cash registers at the Farmer Joe (a giant grocery) in Cape Coral, Florida, they have all sorts of old school candies by the checkout, to set a tone.
- Keep some convenience items: A store needs a shelf or two of the basics, and always milk. Back in Richmond, when we lived in the city, many of the corner markets had been taken over by operators who did not care to make sure that the milk and bread were fresh. The stores became taken over by alcoholics.
- Lay off the beer signs and lottery. You don’t want to make the store look disreputable. If the identity of the store is beer and lottery, and the sort of items folks buy with EBT cards are the core audience of the store, the normal person won’t want to visit.
- Don’t block the windows: Beer and soda vendors will want to fill the window of the store with promotions. But the issue is that the consumer then things that it what the store is about.
- Ice cream works: The trick of the store is having small items that keep people coming in at different times of the day. So coffee in the morning; lunch items, and ice cream. It does not have to be ice cream with cones; a decent freezer case will do. You want the after school crowd, too.
- Souvenirs of the Store: You need merch, a few special tee shirts and mugs and items that show the front of the store. There is no Wa-wa or Circle K or even a Buc-ee’s that can compete with your local store in terms of love or identity. Everyone adores a small town. They will buy a shirt; plus it works for staff clothing. The merchandise needs to be more than just one tee shirt; it should be a few stickers, and variations by season. There is always a local ad specialty store or tee-shirt printer that can help with ideas. Your ally is the local chamber and tourism bureau, to put you on the map. Politicians should stop in and take a photo. Make sure these items are worn by cool kids in high school and you win.
- Use social media: Your store now has a way to be famous across the world. Even a few photos will work to promote the store in search engines.
There are other questions that are harder, particularly for a small market. Whether to sell produce is a consideration; in season for local farmers you are creating a draw, but managing produce is hard with a niche audience, and a small staff. A solution may be to offer a spot in the parking lot for farmer or seafood vendors in season.
Finding help is also an issue; the good news is that when it is a pleasant place to work, it is not stressful for workers, its not a grunt job, like a Circle K. At the Cumnor store, there was a group of really friendly youth working, and it was such a draw that other friends were stopping in.
