PUTNEY — It’s 7 a.m., and Lonie Lisai walks the aisles of Lisai’s Chester Market inspecting the stock, a routine he calls “walking the gauntlet.”
He is pleased; the night staff did a good job. The coolers of milk, soda, yogurt, and produce lining the store’s circumference are filled and neat. Items on the inner shelves like soup, salad dressing, cake mixes and bread are lined up and waiting their colorful labels like a gathering of high school marching bands.
Open since 1993, the Chester store — like the Lisai family’s stores in Bellows Falls, Grafton, and, soon, Putney — caters to the local community seven days a week. Lisai and his brothers, Gary and Brent, are third-generation grocers whose grandparents, Tony and Lena, opened the Bellows Falls market in 1926.
“We hate to see country stores go down,” says Lisai, citing one of the reasons his family chose to take over the Putney General Store.
The general store will represent a homecoming of sorts for Lisai, who points to a large genealogy taped to the office wall of the Chester Market. He traces his mother’s line of Whites and Thayers, including Thomas White, who first settled in Putney in 1760.
“I would expect those five generations of Whites bought and sold their goods at the Putney General Store,” Lisae says. “I would think that the Putney General Store would be a home away from home, where one could converse with friends, talk about current events and perhaps a little gossip,” says Lisai.
“After skipping a couple of generations, my family has the honor and privilege to rekindle the aura of a real country store in Putney.”
Lisai, along with wife Obe and son Ben, will manage the Putney General Store, leasing the space from the Putney Historical Society, which purchased and is renovating the store.
The store has been closed since a fire heavily damaged the building in 2008.
Lisai, who sees his work as a service to the community, has planned a full general store for Putney, including produce, household items, a deli, and a coffee area with tables, chairs and access to the deck. The store will also include Lisai’s trademark meat counter, a family tradition spanning 90 years.
After the Putney General fire, the Lisai family looked into purchasing the store outright, but the costs of rebuilding and bringing the building and surrounding sidewalks into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act standards were prohibitive — not just for them, but also for any potential independent proprietor.
So the Putney Historical Society, a nonprofit organization, agreed to purchase the building and take on the project [The Commons, Oct. 2008], and this winter issued a formal request for proposals.
Lonie and Obe Lisai answered the call.
Of the four businesses submitted RFPs, the historical society interviewed three. According to President Stuart Strotham and Project Manager Lyssa Papazain, the Lisais’ expertise in the grocery business and commitment to community won out.
“Walking into that [Putney] store — it was the ultimate showpiece for a country store in Vermont,” Lisai says.
Putney General is not the first time a nonprofit has invited the Lisai to manage a general store.
“In 2004, Brent and I opted to help keep the Grafton Village Store solvent with our expertise, along with the backing of the Windham Foundation,” says Lisai. “The community has given it 100 percent support.”
Money in the coolers
Fridays are busy at the Chester store, where staff expects an 8 a.m. delivery from the Associated Grocers of New England, a cooperative grocery wholesaler and distributor.
The delivery must be “broken down” by 10 a.m., when staff will need to tend to the wave of midmorning customers. Pallets of everything from avocados to Zippo lighters must be opened, organized, priced, and put on the shelves.
As he passes each cooler, Lisai turns on their lights. “The ones in the ice cream cooler don’t always work,” he says as he flicks the switch. Today is one of those days.
Lisai pulls well-worn blue and green tarps off the open coolers that cover open dairy and produce cases at night to conserve electricity.
He throws the tarps in the office, then descends the steep stairs to the dirt floor basement to open the garage door for the compressors. The 11 compressors feeding the coolers above work better with fresh air, says Lisai.
A store’s money is in its coolers, he says.
“Next time you go shopping,” he says. “And you buy say 10 units of something — how many are related to the cooler?”
Coolers, however, are expensive, with some parts costing as much as $3,000 to replace. Lisae says the Chester store will soon replace a of beverage cooler with a more energy-efficient one — no small job, because along with the expense, Lisai and the staff will need to dismantle the store’s front windows to swap the machinery. The store will recoup the cost of the new cooler through savings on the electricity bill.
In Putney, new coolers will be one of Lisai’s biggest expenses. Between coolers, shelving, inventory, and wages, Lisai expects to invest $250,000 into the Putney General Store.
Whistle while you work
The staff arrives as the delivery truck from the Associated Grocers backs up to the dock.
Lisai, who believes making customers wait is bad for business and keeps the store well staffed, assigns different areas of the store to each employee. They begin breaking down the delivery and restocking shelves.
Many of today’s staff have worked at the store for 10 years or longer. Travis Syr, an 11-year veteran, started when he was in high school and has chosen to stay on.
The morning crew works in harmony with little supervision from Lisai.
“[My] dad thought if you treat your fellow workers with respect and pay a good wage this is the result you get,” says Lisai, who started working with his father at age 6.
The anchor store
The first customers of the day arrive around 9 a.m. Most stop in for their morning coffee – Green Mountain down by the registers – while a few head to the meat counter, where staff advises them on the best cuts.
“If they [Lisai’s] weren’t there, then I’d have to go someplace else,” says Chester resident Andy Ojanen. “Look at what used to be in Chester – shoes, coats, pharmacy – but now you have to go somewhere else.”
Putney learned this the hard way.
“The fire did more damage to the community than the store,” says Lyssa Papazain, the project manager for the Putney Store and Historical Society.
According to Papazain, Putney had a general store for 200 uninterrupted years. Not until after the fire did the town feel the impact of its loss.
“The General Store was the anchor store for Putney,” says Jan Ori, manager and buyer for Silver Forest, a retail store located a few storefronts up from the Putney General Store.
Ori says people from all over the country used to come to see the store, once the longest-continuous-running store in Vermont, and then check out the rest of Putney.
When the general store closed, foot traffic dwindled. Silver Forest cut its hours from seven to three days a week.
“We’re doing well,” says Ori. “But it’s not the same.”
Yet the fire has undoubtedly benefited the grocers who remain.
According to Robyn O’Brien, general manager of the Putney Food Co-op, revenue rose 15 percent after the fire.
Nonetheless, O’Brien looks forward to welcoming the Lisai family to Putney. She feels the Lisai family has done a great job at other stores, is community-minded, and would fill a niche.
“I hate going into this with an idea of competition,” says O’Brien. “It’s [grocery] a crazy business — we’re certainly not in it to make big bucks.”
Mountain Paul’s, across the river on Route 5, has picked up some of the Putney General’s slack.
Benjamin Mousel, owner of Mountain Paul’s, in operation since the 1800’s, is not concerned about the reopening of the store, though he does express disappointment no one in town has asked him how he felt about the Putney General re-opening.
“We’re right here,” he says, describing Mountain Paul’s as the only store in town that “has it all,” from produce to beer, wine, cigarettes and gas.
“Love Lisai’s,” continues Mousel. “And it’ll affect me, but the community will benefit.”
Of the people Lisai has spoken with who view them as only butcher shops, he notes none of them visited any of the family’s stores. Meat cutting may be Lisai’s family’s specialty, but it represents only 35 percent of their business.
Thriving as a community
It’s 10 a.m., and Lisai once again walks the gauntlet. The shelves are restocked, and more customers peruse the aisles.
An employee experiencing the agony of post-wisdom-teeth extraction has called in sick. As Lisai works a split shift, he talks about the fragility of the general store as a local institution.
“Once your general store goes,” he says. “They’re hard to come back.”
“And,” he adds. “You don’t become rich in this business.”
But stores do need to break even.
Lisai acknowledges there could be a fly in the Putney General Store ointment. After the fire, with the store no longer operating and with the extent of the renovations, the building must meet the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The store will require a lot of staff to keep the shelves restocked — Lisai anticipates employing around 20 local people. As a result, with Lisai’s original floor plan, he projects the store just breaking even.
Lisai acknowledges there could be a fly in the General Store ointment.
He needed to plan the layout and think about coolers immediately, even before a project architect was hired. Lisai assumed the building’s layout would remain.
But the Putney General Store lost much of its grandfather status, however, and now must comply with ADA code. There could be a loss of parking and a location change for the store’s entrance. The proposed apartments on the second floor require two ways to exit the building, potentially replacing a bank of coolers with a staircase.
For Lisai, this could boil down to the loss of floor space — floor space that determines how much product a grocer can sell and therefore how much profit he or she makes.
“It’s the law,” he says. “And you can’t get mad about it because it’s the law. It is what it is.”
Reconfiguring the Putney General Store to accommodate ADA could impact his marketing strategy, and things “become more of a challenge to make a break even point.”
“It’s all part of the planning stage,” he says, as he continues planning the store while waiting to hear from the project’s architect.
From generation to generation
Lisai remembers helping his dad and grandfather when he was little. Even while he was still learning to read, they assigned him to restock the cold cereal. He remembers searching for the box with the tiger, and then the rooster, then the bright orange one with the athletes and finally the light blue box with the elves.
“Dad always said that each generation should build off of, grow and prosper from, the previous generation,” says Lisai.
“For some reason, I took for granted the family business — just part of life. However, the fourth generation sees something different — they have seen what hard work, the daily grind, the dedication can produce. Most important, they see a unique family business. We look forward to Putney.”