Minding The Store

a lot of people out of work and displaced even more. Now, businesses need people back and just can't find them. In rural Vermont, Karen Banks faces this issue if she manages a general store, which is the lifeblood of little towns like hers. Well, today we talked to Karen about her fight to keep the store open as the number of her employees dwindles and the population of her town skyrockets. Um. Okay,

so we're just gonna get started here. Um. On a rainy winter evening, I drove over to Bondville, Vermont to meet Karen. Karen Banks, and I am the manager of a large boutique style country grocery store in Bombville, Vermont, the wind Hall Market. We have the fortune of doing an in person interview in her cozy apartment, which is very conveniently located above the market she manages. I should should mention for the tape that we're joined by Crispy.

Crispy is a big, fat white cat. She's twenty years old and very needy. Okay, So the Windhall market that Karen manages, it looks like a typical country store in the center of town. If you walk into a smallest room with a delhi a cash register, but you take a right right around the cash register counter and there is a lot more to it. We have a produced section, we have a wine room, we have a big grocery section, and everybody that comes in says, wow, this place is

way bigger than it looks like. Karen is the face you see on any given day you walk into the market, and her job basically is to run the entire show from the time it opens until the time it closes, take care of customers, put out fires. Literal fires are like metaphorical metaphorical fires. You know, if there are any problems in the day, I take care of it. I receive I order, I make a lot of phone calls, I sell a lot of groceries. Karen is a creature

of habit and statistics. She pours over her sales history, constantly reads about new and trending products you can bring into the store. She knows good business, but at the end of the day, her job is to know people do and have relationships with them. I can know a customer and know when they come in what they're going to pick up and put in there in their basket. I order everything, every box of cereal, every Cannabians it

comes to me. I just know what they like. The Windhall Market is at the base of Stratton Mountain, which means it's a busy, rural ski town. We have a very broad base of customers. Uh we have a lot of visitors. We have some international traffic here, high income millionaires, regular people, just the working class like me. Uh So we cater to all of those people. Besides being where you get your stuff, a general store is also the

social hub a little towns like Bondville. If you want to know any gossip, if you want to know anything that's happened, you come down to the store and you can find out. So one of the roles I guess for us is to communicate with the community, meaning they're heavily involved in all community events, everything that's happening. If there's a fire somewhere in town during the night, they'll open up and deliver coffee to the fireman. They're involved

in the summer concert series in town. The post office is right next door. Just if you live in a town like this, the store is a central part of your life. Oh it is. Everybody that lives in this town comes in the store at one point or another. The thing about general stores that makes them unique is that each one needs to be so specifically catered to

the area that they're in to be successful simultaneously. It's usually the only shop for miles, so its purpose is right in the name general store, meaning you generally have everything we try. There are very few times I've had to look at somebody and say, no, we don't have that. I'm very competitive, so I'm very competitive about not being out of anything. She says. She sees it as a game,

and it's the game she likes. There's about six thousand products in the store, and it's her job to meticulously look at all her reports or buying history, seasonal trends, just to keep the right things on the shelves at the right times. It's a thoughtful process ordering for the market. It's a competition with myself. I guess I like to stay right on it, make sure I have everything that everybody needs. Probably one of the biggest overachievers you'll ever meet.

Running a place like this is hard in any environment, but with COVID and complications like short staffing, supply chain issues, and keeping the store COVID free, Karen's competitive attitude has really been put to the test, and she is constantly in a battle to keep the store from closing. But I can't imagine what would happen. I mean, you'd be driving fifteen miles one way or another to go to a grocery, which, in a place like this is a really big impact on your day. It is. It is

a big impact on your day. It's gas, it's your time. Are the roads good or are the roads bad? It just would be unbelievable for us not to be here. You might have picked up on Karen's accent. She's not from Vermont. Young Karen is from the South, and she's an army brat and grew up all over the country. I was born in Virginia, lived in Alaska, Missouri, Georgia, Alabama, just grew up all over the place. She had a loving family, says that they were huggers. She was the

only girl. She grew up with three brothers. Big tom boy, I can fight. I could give you a black eye. Pretty great childhood, do you. Went to University of Kentucky where she came out a highly trained dentist assistant. And we were trained to be the dentist's right hand. We could do anything that wasn't permanent. The dentist would come in and he would prep the tooth. I'd come in and finish it. Very unusual to see that in any state, which made it a great career. She got paid well.

She did that for about twenty five years. She had a son named Kelly. They moved to Vermont, and the laws were different here. So she was making less as a dentist assistant because she was allowed to do less, not what I was used to making. And so my son and I we like to do some expensive stuff that ski. We love Nascar, We like to travel to races, and that's not cheap. So um I decided to segue. Someone in town said that she might be perfect for a job organizing banquets at a nearby resort, and I

was really good at it. From there, she got hired at Stratton, the big ski mountain in town, where I met the former owner of this market. I was a middle manager at the private ski club where she and her family were members. This woman's name was Lorraine. Then they hit it off. Immediately after Karen's son graduated high school, she wanted to move closer to work and moved to this apartment above the store which Lorraine owned. When Lorraine's GM left the store, she asked Karen if she'd take

the job, and I did. The rest is history. What were your first impressions? I knew nothing about grocery she she brought me in here knowing that I knew absolutely nothing about running a grocery store. But what I am is very detail oriented, great memory, great customer service skills, and knew a lot of her customers. Unsurprisingly, Karen was really good at it. She jumped right in and has been the face of the wind home market ever since. I know Karen makes it sound easy, but to give

an example of how hard a business this is. In my little town of Belmont, Vermont, I've seen the general store passed through five different owners in twenty five years. The burnout ray is high. And anyone going into this business knows that what did you have any like reservations when you first came in and like thinking if I don't know if I could do this? Now I'm full speed ahead. I'm that kind of girl that that just jumps in with both feet. I don't I don't think

there's anything you can't learn to do. I raised a child with a rare genetic syndrome, less than a hundred cases in the world, Karen's son, Kelly. He has ours COG, which is a rare disorder that can prevent physical growth and messes with your short and long term memory. So on any given day, he may or may not be able to tell you what his birthday is. He almost stopped growing when he was a little over two years old, but they got him on the right medication and he's

five ten now. Don't feel sorry for him. He's got two degrees. He graduated Magna and Simicum wild from his colleges. He's a smart kid. I didn't raise him to think that he had a disability. I raised him to believe that he can do anything he wants to do, and he does anything he wants to do. He never whined about it. No whining in our family and absolutely not allowed because look around, there are so many people in the world that are disadvantaged and not able to work,

not able to provide for themselves with their family. If you can get up and walk on your two legs every day and go to work and earn money and and make a decent living, you're incredibly blessed. You seem like a very stubborn, class half full person. Oh my glass, my glass is running over. Let me get back from the break. The unstoppable force that is Karen Banks meets the immovable object that is COVID. A strong work ethic takes pride in a job well done, sweats over the details.

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hit that march, everything changed. It just was. It was crazy. It was unreal how difficult it was and how fast we had to react in the food chain business too, to get the things that our customers needed. The store actually didn't close right away. It was chaotic. They hustled to get their website streamlined for online ordering, and then they locked the doors and they went curbside. We went tremendous curbside we had and we had a lot of

employees here at the time. I bet we had fourteen employees. We worked eight hours, nine hours a day. All we did was shop, shop, shop, shop, shop, no talking, no no lunch, no brakes, sometimes eighty orders a day, eight orders a day. It's common knowledge that most businesses face supply issues around this time and still do. But in a general store with six thousand items, the supply chain

issues of COVID affected virtually everything in Karen's life. And we had to do something that I didn't think I would ever have to do and I hope I never have to do it again. Um, I had to rash in toilet paper. I had to tell somebody, no, you can only have three rolls of toilet paper. Two things of strawberries and chicken wings were non existent, and um,

it was. It was just awful to have to tell people that they couldn't have what they wanted, because your job is to provide what people want more than anything. The biggest challenge for Karen was to see all of those people that she saw on a daily basis adjusting to their new reality. It was heartbreaking to see people afraid, afraid. A lot of people came to pick up their groceries and h we couldn't have any contact with them, and we would leave their groceries outside. They'd wear gloves, they'd

be masked. Um, they'd have disinfectant wipes. It was just sad for me to see how scared people were. In addition to that, a ton of people swarmed to towns like this from cities terrified of the pandemic. She remembers a young couple coming into the store right before they went curbside, and the wife was obviously pregnant, and he was asking some questions about the neighborhood and I said, oh, you guys just getting here and he said, oh, yeah, we just came out from Manhattan. We're trying to get

out of the city. And I said, oh, do you realize you need to quarantine? Have you quarantined? And he said, no, we haven't. He said, you're not going to call the police, saw me, are you? I just needed to get my wife out of the city. She's pregnant. I'm afraid for her. And then well, of course I'm not going to call the police. I'm just I'm just saying, you know, you need to quarantine, be careful. He was afraid that I

was going to call the police on him. How sad is that as a pandemic went on, the Windhall Market eventually did open their doors up and we're not strictly curbside, but Karen was facing a whole new set of challenges in this new normal. A big one was population. You know that young couple that was coming from the city to escape with the pregnant wife. Thousands and thousands of people did that. A lot of them stayed. We had three to five thousand extra people living here during COVID.

That's I don't say it's I don't think people understand how big that is for a small place like that. That's double the population. So now in do you have more customers coming into the store than you ever have? Yes, at the moment. How many people do you have working in the store for how many should be? Really, we should be fifteen strong. We have not had a break, I would say since nineteen Just to remind you listening, they had fourteen people when the pandemic started. This specifically

is a huge problem in rural areas like this. All the properties around here got bought up by people coming from out of state, and any extra rooms that locals do have are being used for Airbnb instead of apartments for potential employees that live there. You can't find people to work because there aren't people here. No, No, there aren't. Alien abductions That's what I think. If you have more customers than you ever have and you only have four when you think your stuff fifteen, how do you do it?

We work long hours. The employees that are there are very high integrity, high production employees. We we can get a lot done in a short amount of time, but we work a lot of hours. I work anywhere from Oh I think my paycheck this time was seventy two hours. Whenever they can, they pick up some part time help, like a fourteen year old high school student that comes by sometimes. Great kid. He comes in a couple of

days after school and gives me an hour. Another guy who works full time at the Scheme Mountain nearby, and we'll come in and sweep and mop and do some heavy lifting for me in the evening. A couple of days a week. She takes extra hours from them whenever she can. Karen all So again conveniently lives in the building. So the administrative part of it is easy for me. I'm not ashamed to say it. I'll sit with a glass of wine and do the grocery order. I've earned it,

yeah I have. And that grocery order takes about five hours. I'm constantly thinking of ways to work smarter and not harder in this grocery. But there are literally six thousand things and they have to you have to get them on the shelves and it's not a piece of cake. But that's where with all of this I said, this market is not going under, it's not going down. We're going to maintain a standard of excellence, a standard of

service to the community because they need that. It would be terrible in my heart, in my mind not to provide that for this community. I spent a long time away from my hometown, a town just like this one, and going to the store growing up, you grab what you needed. You saw the same people every day. Often you'd have the same conversations with those people, generally about the weather. It's routine, and I admittedly you took that

for granted. Because when I ended up back in Vermont during COVID and couldn't see my friends, you couldn't see my family, I would look forward to going to the store in a way that I never did before because it was the one place that you could go and check in to make sure that everyone you knew was okay. And at a certain point, that's what Karen was providing not just things people needed, but human connection in a

time where there wasn't much. This is a small community, and we know each other, and we care about each other, and we check on each other. You know. They wanted to know if we were okay, and we wanted to know if they were okay. Karen had to shut her doors in the beginning before she went curbside. My town's general store did the same, so we got a taste of what the town would look like without it temporarily.

But the idea of it closing and the idea of it not being there is something I don't think I've ever considered, and I'm sure that people are here never considered like it's the it's the general Store, it's the wind Hall Market. It will be there, and there's been a lot of uncertainty in the last few years, and and it seems that you maybe are like the one certain thing here. Well, we we like to think where the rock, you know, it's like, what would people We

had to help people. There was no question that we had to help them through the lockdown. There's just not a question that it won't be here, regardless of staffing issues, supply chain or whatever the world throws their way, the town of Bonville can rest easy knowing that Karen Banks is not a whiner and if she wants to do something, she is going to do it. I agreed to it, and I believe that if you take it on, do

it with a smile. And I'll do it with a smile at eight o'clock in the morning, and I'll do it if I'm there at eight o'clock at night. I'll still have the same smile. Just so you know listening. Karen has a vacation coming up. She's going to the Philippines with one of her co workers in the store. It'll be the first break they've had since two thousand nine. For on the job. I motuscry there to do these things.