Quechee
Sheryl Trainor, of White River Junction, who has owned and operated the gas station and convenience store at the eastern end of Route 4 since 1995, said she tried to make the store “a cut above normal,” but staffing challenges, the increased use of credit cards and changes to the state’s business environment all contributed to her decision to close.
“I’ll tell you what I’ve told other people,” she said in a telephone interview on Wednesday, “it’s the changing business climate in Vermont, it’s the situation with employees, which has become intolerable, and it’s the way the … gas station-convenience store business is headed.”
Large corporations, with their economies of scale, “are going to be the players,” she said, not single-owner stores.
Finding and keeping employees, Trainor said, was “definitely part of the problem.” But so-called “swipe fees” or “interchange fees” — the fees that credit card processors such as MasterCard and American Express charge retailers when customers use a credit card to pay for purchases — were taking a bigger and bigger bite out of her store’s income, she said. Credit card purchases recently accounted for 75-85 percent of her sales, she said, compared with about 50 percent when she opened the store 21 years ago.
According to the Merchants Payments Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group representing supermarkets, restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations and other retailers, merchants pay $2 to $4 on every $100 spent using a credit card, which amounts to some $50 billion a year paid by retailers in swipe fees.
“In many cases,” the group says on its website, “the swipe fee is higher than what the merchant earns on the sale.”
For many stores, the group said, swipe fees have tripled since 2004 and are now the second-biggest operating expense after labor.
Trainor, who is an artist and printmaker as well as president of Amalusia Ltd., the corporate entity that owned the Quechee Mobil Mart, said she was sad about the closing but proud of the way she ran the store.
“I kept my employees safe. I tried to treat my employees as human beings. I tried to give them schedules they could count on,” she said. “I paid them weekly instead of biweekly, which would have been cheaper, because I know what it’s like to live on that salary.”
Trainor said she wasn’t sure what she was going to do next, but said she did know it will be hard not to go to the job she’s had for more than two decades.
“I am going to miss my regular customers that I saw every day and enjoyed having a relationship with, not to mention some of my employees,” she said.
The store was dark on Wednesday afternoon, as it had been since at least Friday. A sign on the front door said, “We are closed. Sorry for the inconvenience.” Inside, a display stand held locally made preserves and jams and a wire rack offered postcards of colorful scenes from Woodstock. Large historical photographs from the Upper Valley lined the walls and a small blackboard touted the offerings of the Briar Rose Deli, including fresh pizza and breakfast sandwiches. Trainor said the deli, a subsidiary business of Amalusia Ltd., was named for the farm that once occupied the site.
Outside, orange cones blocked access to the gas pumps, and sandwich boards at the entrances to the parking lot also announced that the business was closed.
Bill Barry, of Quechee, who pulled his slate-green Toyota Camry into the parking lot to pick up a friend, said he had been coming to the Quechee Mobil Mart for about six years. He said he learned the other day that the store was closed. “It was very convenient to have a local place” to get gas and buy coffee, he said. Now, he said, he’ll probably go to the Jiffy Mart about 3½ miles to the west.
A quarter-mile or so from the Quechee Mobil Mart, at the Route 4 Country Store, Deli and BBQ, owner Margie Battaglia said she knew Trainor was committed to her business.
“She had a beautiful store and she put her whole heart and soul into it,” she said.
Battaglia’s son, Joe, a 2011 Hartford High School graduate, called the Quechee Mobil Mart an “icon” on Route 4 and said he particularly liked the historical photographs inside.
The 1.67-acre lot and 3,490-square-foot building are appraised at $619,800 and have been owned by members of the Gorevan family since 1983, according to Hartford town records.
The bankruptcy petition, filed Tuesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Vermont, seeks Chapter 7 protection, which usually leads to the liquidation of a company’s assets. Proceeds from the sale of the assets are usually used to satisfy debts.
The filing indicates the company had 33 creditors, including Casella Waste Systems, FairPoint Communications, People’s United Bank and the Vermont Lottery, in addition to Trainor herself and a number of smaller Upper Valley businesses, including the Valley News.
The company’s estimated assets were listed at less than $50,000 and its liabilities were listed at between $100,001 and $500,000.
Trainor’s attorney, Michelle M. Kainen, said Thursday the next step is to meet with the company’s creditors. The company’s assets are now in the hands of the bankruptcy trustee, who will determine what can be sold to raise money to satisfy the company’s debts and will work with the landlord, Summit Distributing LLC, of Lebanon, to find a new operator for the business.
“We certainly want to reopen the location,” Tom Frawley, president of Summit Distributing, said on Friday. “We haven’t made a decision on operators.”
The company’s assets include the gasoline still in the storage tanks and the products remaining in the coolers. Because much of that inventory is perishable, Kainen said, and because the landlord in interested in getting revenue flowing from the site again, she expects the process to move quickly.
“I think that this is something that’s going resolve itself in a matter of weeks,” she said.
Ernie Kohlsaat can be reached at ekohlsaat@vnews.com or 603-727-3302.