Nonprofit will try to buy building for Orwell community
By STEVEN JUPITER
ORWELL—On a sunny weekend, especially in summer, Buxton’s on Main Street in Orwell fairly bursts with locals and tourists alike ordering the store’s famous gourmet sandwiches, picking up supplies for a camping trip, grabbing a six-pack, or just coming in to visit with the current owner, Andy Buxton, the latest of the Buxton family to preside over the iconic shop.
On days like those, it’s often impossible for Andy to even catch his breath.
Yet, as hectic and exhausting as those days can be, they’re also lucrative and there haven’t been enough of them lately. So, Andy and his wife, Mary, have made the heartwrenching decision to close the shop at the end of this month, in its 57th year. The closure had been looming in Andy’s mind for a while—the financial and personal pressures of the business had become unsustainable—but last week the Buxtons made the announcement in a Facebook video.
The news stunned the local community.
“About a week before we made the video, I told my family we were going to close,” Andy said on a quiet afternoon at his shop last week. “The Saturday before, we were shortstaffed at the store and my two daughters were home alone for 8 hours. The younger girl started feeling sick and we weren’t there to comfort her because we were here making sandwiches. I have so many photos on my phone of my kids that were taken by other people and sent to me because I was working. People tell me memories of my own kids. My kids deserve more. We owe them more.”
Andy added that if the store were profitable, he’d try to find a way to keep it going. But changes in the post-COVID labor market and in shopping habits have put an unmanageable strain on the business.
“At our peak, I signed about 25 paychecks a week,” he said. “Now I’ve got 5 paid employees and we’re operating at reduced hours. I’ve got an amazing, dedicated team, but we can’t operate with only 5 employees. A general can’t lead into battle if the infantry isn’t there.”
“I don’t want to blame the problems of the business 100% on COVID,” he continued. “But it definitely had an effect. After the pandemic, people took jobs with easier hours and better benefits. We’re open every day except Christmas. People want a better work-life balance.”
Andy’s grandparents, Dick and Thelma Buxton, who established the store in 1967, had initially refused to sell Andy the business for exactly that reason: they knew the toll it takes.
“They didn’t want that for me,” said Andy, who grew up helping out at the store with the rest of his family. “They said ‘No way, José’ when I asked about buying the business when I was 26 back in 2006. They didn’t want me to miss out on family life like they did.”
It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, however, since his grandparents’ refusal to sell to him allowed him to continue working in hospitality, honing his managerial and culinary skills.
“I thought I could handle it at the time,” he laughed. “But I would’ve known only what my grandparents knew and would’ve only been able to continue it their way.”
So, ready to retire, Dick and Thelma sold the store in 2006 to someone outside the family, a man named Doug Edwards from upstate New York. Doug continued the place under the Buxton’s name, but soon came to realize that running the main store in a small rural town can take a lot out of a fella.
“Doug is a good man, but he was burning out,” said Andy.
In 2015, Andy and Mary moved back to Orwell from Middlebury. One day Andy found himself in the store just as a customer.
“It was around Christmas,” Andy recalled. “I was just shopping, and Doug said that if I was ever interested in buying back the store to let him know. Mary and I hemmed and hawed, but I wanted to do something on my own and thought, ‘Wait a minute…maybe this is the path.’”
The sale was completed two years later, in 2017, when Andy and Mary’s daughters were 2 and 4. The girls have grown up helping out, just as Andy did.
“It’s great. They help at the register,” he said. “People love to see that involvement.”
Andy set about transforming Buxton’s from a general store that sold everything under the sun—“My grandfather had spark plugs for every known car and boxes of toilet flanges in the back”—to a food-based market.
“I don’t know anything about toilet flanges and it didn’t make sense to stock inventory you might sell once a year,” he laughed.
Andy developed his own menu. The gourmet sandwiches became a Buxton’s trademark, with people traveling from all over the area to give themselves a treat. He also got a license to sell liquor as an 802 Spirits outlet, though he likens the onerous process to “applying for two different mortgages in two different countries.” He hoped to keep his customers in town so they wouldn’t need to travel to Brandon, Fair Haven, or Middlebury to buy alcohol and might pick up a few other things while they were in the store.
“I’ve accomplished 100% of the business plan I started with,” said Andy.
But, as has been the case with many small rural stores throughout the state, it hasn’t been enough.
The pandemic not only caused a state-wide labor shortage in retail and hospitality, but it also made it difficult and expensive to procure goods and produce prepared meals. Basics like fry-o-lator oil and kitchen gloves became impossible to get. The supply chain has mostly returned to normal but there are still consumer products, such as Lysol spray, that a small store like Buxton’s can’t obtain from its suppliers.
And the pandemic changed shopping habits. Buxton’s adapted to the lockdowns by developing an e-mail ordering system with curbside pickup and touchless payments. But people got used to buying online, to the point where even now Andy still sees Fresh Direct and Blue Apron deliveries with local addresses in the back of his regular UPS guy’s truck.
“That’s something I could’ve done for them,” he said. “Those are sales I would’ve had before. And there are too many days when I’m in here with my staff at 6:30 a.m. ready to go and we don’t have our first sale until 9:30. That’s hard.”
“I’ve got the best customers, people who have been coming here for years and would follow me anywhere,” Andy was quick to add. “I’ve always tried to price things fairly and am cheaper on some things than Shaws or Hannaford. But I’ve got customers who stopped coming here because they found their favorite beer for 30¢ less in Middlebury.”
The Buxtons also took on debt to revamp and expand the operation after they bought it. They remodeled the space and installed a commercial kitchen, among other improvements. But the store’s sales, especially after COVID, have not been sufficient to keep the store going.
The combined pressures of finance and family ultimately pushed the Buxtons to give up something precious to them.
“I said to Mary, ‘We’re burying a 57-year-old family member,’” Andy recalled of the moments after they made the Facebook announcement. “’And we just read the obituary in a 3-minute video.’”
A novel approach
After the news of Buxton’s closing broke, Joe Andriano felt sympathy for his friends Andy and Mary, and sorrow for his town, which would be losing one of its most significant assets. Andriano isn’t just another local customer, however; he also represents Orwell in the Vermont House of Representatives and is an attorney with extensive experience creating nonprofit organizations.
He believed he could help the Buxtons and the town of Orwell.
“Andy and Mary are friends and neighbors,” said Andriano in a phone conversation. “Their happiness is paramount. But Buxton’s is also the heartbeat of Orwell. People come here from all over. It’s so helpful to the community to have it. It means a lot to us as Orwellians.”
So Andriano proposed something unexpected to Andy and Mary.
He would form a nonprofit with the goal of buying the building from the Buxtons, relieving them of the financial stress of maintaining it and preserving for the people of Orwell the ability to determine the use of it according to their own vision.
“I’ve worked on nonprofits my entire career as an attorney,” said Andriano, who is not seeking re-election in November. “I have a lot of expertise in business law.”
The first phase of the plan would entail raising money through a GoFundMe campaign to forestall a fire sale of the building. The goal is to raise enough to allow the Buxtons to service their debts while the nonprofit attempts to raise additional funds for the purchase of the building. If successful, the GoFundMe would create a window for the nonprofit to seek and obtain the necessary funds for the purchase. Without an influx of cash, said Andriano, the Buxtons would have to sell the building to whoever was willing to buy it and the community would lose an opportunity to guide the fate of one of its most important pieces of commercial real estate.
The GoFundMe set up by Andriano is seeking $103K to cover a year of the Buxtons’ building-related expenses.
“We will take any portion [of that year],” said Andriano. “Whatever we raise through the GoFundMe buys us time.”
If the GoFundMe raises sufficient funds to stave off a sale, Andriano and the nonprofit will raise additional monies for the purchases of the building through grants. Ownership of the property will transfer to the nonprofit. The town of Orwell will not be a party in the sale or purchase.
Phase two will entail a series of community meetings in Orwell to determine what the town’s residents want to do with the space, as well as a structural evaluation of the building to determine what work will need to be done to preserve the historic building and prepare it for the community’s chosen purpose.
Phase three will be the execution of that chosen purpose. The nonprofit will retain ownership of the building and will collect rent from any commercial venture that occupies it. The rent money will be used for the physical upkeep of the building. The goal is not to generate income but rather to maintain a community resource.
Andriano mentioned Albany and East Calais as examples of other Vermont towns where similar projects have been undertaken after the loss of core retail. In fact, Andriano is traveling this week to East Calais to learn more about that town’s experience. Grant programs through organizations such as the Preservation Trust of Vermont have helped towns like Albany and East Calais save key historic buildings for community use.
“I will not accept a cent,” insisted Andriano. “This is 100% volunteer. We will hire an outside attorney to handle the real estate transaction, which we expect will be paid for by grants. My only motive is I love this community.”
“There’s been a lot of confusion about this project,” said Andy Buxton in our earlier conversation. “It’s not like I’m asking to have gambling debts paid off. The GoFundMe is a risk. If it doesn’t work, I’ll have to sell the building to whoever has money. Buxton’s is done, but I’ve got one more gift to give the town: I can give them the choice of what to do with the building.”
[Editor’s note: Anyone interested in donated to the GoFundMe campaign can visit the campaign’s page at https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-save-buxtons-store-preserve-the-heart-of-orwell-vt]
