Minding The Store

General store manager Karen Banks perseveres through the turbulence of losing her employees, and the huge influx of customers coming into her small Vermont town. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to On the Job. This season, we're focusing on
how people and businesses are getting back to work. Let's
call it a great transformation, a change in the way
workers are thinking. Employers need people to work more than ever,
putting laborers in a sort of position of power. We'll
be hearing from people navigating this new normal for themselves
as they find their life's work. Across the US, small

(00:33):
business owners are facing a huge hiring crisis. COVID put
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

(00:54):
her employees dwindles and the population of her town skyrockets. Okay,
so we're just gonna get started here. On a rainy
winter evening, I drove over to Bonville, Vermont to meet Karen.
Karen Banks and I am the manager of a large
boutique style country grocery store in Bombville, Vermont, the wind

(01:17):
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 shouldn't I should
mention for the tape that we're joined by Crispy. Crispy's
a big, fat white cat. She's twenty years old and
very needy. Okay, So the Windhall Market that Karen manages,

(01:40):
it looks like a typical country store in the center
of town. If you walk into a smallish 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

(02:01):
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,

(02:22):
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 she can bring
into the store. She knows good business, but at the
end of the day, her job is to know people.
Oh I do and have relationships with them. I can

(02:43):
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,

(03:04):
which means it's a busy, rural ski town. We have
a very broad base of customers. We have a lot
of visitors. We have some international traffic here, high income millionaires,
regular people just the working class like me. So we
cater to all of those people. Besides being where you

(03:26):
get your stuff, a general store is also the social
hub in 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

(03:49):
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 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

(04:11):
be so specifically catered to the area that they're in
to be successful simultaneously. It's usually the only shot 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

(04:31):
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, her
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.

(04:54):
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

(05:16):
to the test, and she is constantly in a battle
to keep the store from closing. Well. 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

(05:37):
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

(06:00):
screw 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. She went to a 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

(06:23):
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

(06:45):
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.
We like ski We loved Nascar. We like to travel
to races, and that's not cheap. So I decided to segue.
Someone in town said that she might be perfect for
a job organizing banquets at a nearby resort, and I

(07:09):
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

(07:29):
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
brought me in here knowing that I knew absolutely nothing

(07:51):
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

(08:14):
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. Well, did you have any reservations when you
first came in and like thinking, Oh, I don't know
if I could do this. No, I'm full speed ahead.

(08:35):
I'm that kind of girl that that just jumps him
with both feet. 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 ARSCOG, which is a rare
disorder that can prevent physical growth and messes with your

(08:56):
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 Sumac hm WOUD from his colleges. He's

(09:16):
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

(09:37):
look around, there are so many people in the world
that are disadvantaged and not able to work, not able
to provide for themselves or their family. If you can
get up and walk on your two legs every day
and go to work and earn money and make a
decent living, you're incredibly blessed. You seem like a very stubborn,

(10:00):
class half full person. Yoh myas my glass is running over.
When we 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,

(10:21):
sweats over the details. This is you. But to get
an honest day's work, you need a response. You need
a callback. You need a job. Express Employment professionals can
help because we understand what it takes to get a job.
It takes more than just online searches to land a job.

(10:42):
It takes someone who will identify your talents, a person
invested in your success. At Express, we can even complete
your application with you over the phone, will prepare you
for interviews and will connect you to the right company.
Plus we'll never charge a fee to find you a
job at Express. We could put you to work with
companies of all sizes and industries from the production floor

(11:04):
to the front office. Expressns jobs get to No Express,
find your location at expresspros dot com or on the
Express Jobs out The winner of twenty nineteen was a
busy one in Bondville, Vermont. There was a lot of snow,
a lot of tourists, and when COVID hit that March,
everything changed. It just was. It was crazy. It was

(11:28):
unreal how difficult it was and how fast we had
to react in the food chain business 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

(11:52):
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 lunch, no breaks. Sometimes eighty orders a day,
eighty orders a day. It's common knowledge that most businesses

(12:15):
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. I had to rash
in toilet paper. I had to tell somebody, no, you

(12:38):
can only have three rolls of toilet paper. Two things
of strawberries and chicken wings were non existent, and it
was just awful to have to tell people that they
couldn't have what they wanted, because your job is to

(13:01):
provide what people want. That's right. 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

(13:21):
and we couldn't have any contact with them, and we
would leave their groceries outside. They'd wear gloves, they'd be masked,
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

(13:42):
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 up from Manhattan. We're trying to get out of
the city. And I said, oh, do you realize you

(14:03):
need to quarantine? Have you quarantined? And he said, no,
we haven't. He said, you're not going to call the
police on 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 I'm just saying, you know,
you need to quarantine. Be careful. He was afraid that

(14:25):
I was going to call a 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 by twenty twenty two, Karen was facing
a whole new set of challenges in this new normal.

(14:45):
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

(15:05):
for a small place like that. That's double the population.
That's huge. So now in twenty twenty two, 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? Four? How many should be really fifteen?

(15:31):
We should be fifteen strong. We have not had a break,
I would say since twenty 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 an estate, and any extra rooms that locals do

(15:53):
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 you're stuff fifteen, how do you do it?

(16:15):
We work long hours. The employees that are there are
very high integrity, high production employees. 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.

(16:38):
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 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.

(16:59):
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. Thank you earned that,
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

(17:22):
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,

(17:47):
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

(18:10):
grabbed 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

(18:30):
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

(18:51):
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

(19:12):
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 here
never considered, like it's the it's the general Store, it's
the Windhall Market. It will be there, and there's been
a lot of uncertainty in the last few years, and

(19:35):
and it seems that you maybe are like the one
certain thing here. Well, we like to think we're 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,

(20:05):
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

(20:26):
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

(20:47):
with one of her co workers in the store. It'll
be the first break they've had since twenty nineteen. For
on the job. I'm modus cry to the st