Healthy Survival

Like town meetings and one-room schools, country and general stores in Vermont risk becoming an endangered species. As one of the vital links from past to present to future, Vermont's country and general stores help give a community its focus and maintain the spirit and values of Vermont, featuring local products, providing a communications center, showing the example of hard work, and revealing the essence of community service.

For Vermont, it's not just a matter of keeping the stores alive as curiosities or museum pieces. It's more than keeping them merely viable. Instead, it's crucial to increase their visibility, maintain their purpose, and grow their place in the eyes of both the people who frequent them and those who visit our State.

Unlike the local school, the country store is a community center for everyone. We meet to talk while we shop. We learn who's sick and who's better. Who's in the buck pool. What's happening in town. Notices are posted, curiosities are satisfied, rumors are born--and quashed. The crossroads of the Vermont town is found in its independent country store, where we visit each day for milk, where we bring guests for souvenirs, and most of all, where we find the spirit of Vermont is still alive.

But the country and general stores are not community service organizations. They are independent businesses whose strong and healthy survival is essential to the owners and their families, and ultimately to the community.

How can this healthy survival be encouraged?

Survival comes first and foremost through visibility--encouraging everyone to shop in the country and general stores. Vermont gives its official attention to major tourist attractions and products such as ski areas, maple syrup, and dairy goods. If Vermont products fill the country stores, and more than that, they are the stop for supplies and directions and advice on the way to Vermont's other attractions--covered bridges, ancient sycamores, skiing and leaf-peeping, colleges and universities, music and arts festivals, and even ice cream tours--then the country and general stores are a linchpin of Vermont tourism. Beyond that (and unlike many tourist attractions), the country and general stores are five-season businesses, waiting to serve customers 365 days a year. Stores are independent community members who have long practiced public service.

The improvement of the image of Vermont's general and country stores through the work of the Alliance will bring more tourist trade, and raise the visibility of and respect for the stores within the community.

Vermont's country and general stores have been the center of the community for nearly two centuries; they can be fruitful for the long term, well into another century.