Moving Forward Together

By Clem Nilan, General Manager

On Monday, February 20, City Market hosted a local cupcake party to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the opening of our new location. A long line of members and shoppers queued up at the cupcake table and five board members were on hand to answer questions and pass out cupcakes, milk or soy milk, and smiles to an appreciative crowd. Another exciting milestone is just around corner.

In 2013 Onion River Co-op will be celebrating our 40th anniversary! This date is based upon our official Articles of Incorporation registry through the state of Vermont. Anecdotal information traces us back much further. As some of our most valuable Co-op stories are fading into history, we decided to commemorate our 40th anniversary by collecting as much of the information as possible about our origins. We commissioned Joyce Cellars to interview a list of Co-op founders to collect and preserve the history of our beginning. Joyce’s day job is Community Relations Manager for the Intervale Center. Joyce brings an incredible level of enthusiasm and great people skills and has conducted many interviews already in preparation for our 40th anniversary. If you are a longtime Co-op member that Joyce hasn’t yet contacted, please contact Allison in our Member Services department at 861-9750 or aweinhagen@citymarket.coop so she can put you in touch! We’d love to have more photos, stories, and interesting facts from the early days to share with our community. We hope to present this information at the 2013 annual meeting.

Second Location Builds Buzz

So the cat is officially out of the bag. After my newsletter article last month and a blog posting on the Seven Days website about potential Co-op expansion plans, both WCAX and WPTZ sent crews here to interview us on our plans. The great news from this exposure is the out pouring of positive feedback from members. Well over 90% of comments are very favorable to opening a second store. Where it gets really interesting is the phenomenon I jokingly call the anti-NIMBY movement. NIMBY, of course, is an acronym for not in my backyard. It seems everybody wants a second store in their backyard!

This past weekend I attended a conference with Terry Appleby, the venerable General Manager of the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society (HCCS). This name might not be familiar to you, but it should be. When Don Schramm and his merry band of Cooperators were promoting Onion River Co-op as the logical choice to become the city's downtown supermarket, Terry Appleby came to Burlington and testified in front of the City Council as to why the Co-op was the better choice. In addition to paving the way for us to be here, Terry and the HCCS generously donated hours and hours of superb advice and technical assistance in our formative stage, enabling us to get on our feet when the going was really rough. It's not an exaggeration to say that without Terry’s help, we may not have made it out of that formative stage. Once again Mr. Appleby is looking over our shoulder as our guardian angel. He told me that, in his experience, many people will want to have a say in where the Co-op locates a second store. Terry exhorts us to make the second store selection process data-driven.

To review last month’s newsletter article, we started that data-driven process by consulting with a co-op expert to create a market study, comparing a number of different potential second store locations. The Pine Street corridor was recommended as the clear winner for a second store. The pressing reason for a second store now is to relieve some pressure on our current location with its incredibly high sales per square foot performance. Eventually, this performance level may impact our customers’ shopping experience and staff morale. So from the perspective of relieving pressure on the current store while still having enough of a market to support a second store, the Pine Street corridor was the most viable location.

We’re just now creating our draft project timelines and plans and will find creative ways to ensure that the various stakeholders of this project stay in the loop. We have a lot of unanswered questions at this point and I’m sure you do to. As we create lists of questions for ourselves and our members, we’ll make sure to keep you informed and ask for feedback when we need additional inputs into the process throughout the way.

Many thanks to you, our members and customers, as we celebrate our heritage with 10 years on South Winooski Avenue and 40 years as the Onion River Cooperative. At the same time, we’re celebrating what we envision for the future and those next 10 years! Stay tuned.