The faint smell of incense and a familiar scene of narrow aisles stocked with local food greet visitors to the Plainfield Co-op. The single 1,200-square-foot room in Plainfield village boasts a wood-paneled ceiling and can be thoroughly perused in minutes.
photo by Catherine Morrissey
“It feels like a trip to the 1970s,” co-op board secretary Andy Robinson said.
Unsurprisingly, the storefront can be traced back to 1978 when early co-op members purchased the space — partly inspired by the back-to-the-land movement of the time. The business has been there ever since.
But the old building has been showing its age. Now a recent move to address that reality has changed the trajectory of both the co-op’s future and that of another prominent local business: Plainfield Hardware.
Co-op members voted by a 156–34 margin in June to purchase and relocate to the significantly larger 2,500-square-foot hardware store on Route 2 in East Montpelier, Robinson said, about two miles away. The store was up for sale, and in August the co-op bought it for about $2 million. The purchase included the business of the store and will see a merger of its workforce with existing co-op staff, said Robinson.
The change comes at what seems to be a significant time for co-operative businesses in the region as two other food co-ops within a 30-minute driving radius, the Hunger Mountain Co-op in Montpelier and Buffalo Mountain Co-op in Hardwick, have undergone significant changes in the last six years. The former began a $2.86 million expansion in 2018, according to the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, while the latter moved in 2022 from a spot of comparable size to Plainfield’s to the building of the former Hardwick Village Market on Mill Street.
Robinson said matters of necessity rather than preference drove Plainfield members’ relocation votes.
“It’s an old building, it’s cramped, it’s in a fairly inaccessible location,” he said, “and given the size and the amount of product you can put on the shelves and many other things, it has struggled to be profitable.”
Angie Domino, who has worked for the co-op since 2010 and is currently its chief buyer, cited forces beyond the village to blame. She said the pandemic and the closing of Goddard College dealt blows to business.
“Goddard College used to have a big part of the liveliness of this area,” she said. “When it was full, there were new students coming in with fresh energy, fresh ideas. They were shopping at the little shops.”
Robinson said the board first began looking for future locations two years ago, partly inspired by other co-ops expanding. A federal grant of about $30,000, handled by the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission, paid for a chart of options for the co-op.
One option would have been to renovate, a solution that promised a setback in 2027 when the town plans to reconstruct Main Street. Somewhere during the process, Robinson said the hardware store came up for sale. The projected cost of buying the business, which includes a greenhouse and a deli, was $2.15 million.
Starting this past spring the co-op raised $475,000 in gifts and member loans, then received about $1.4 million from lenders. The co-op sealed the deal August 7.
“I think we are part of a larger movement,” he said.
He said the Plainfield Co-op hopes to diversify inventory in a way that echoes Hardwick’s Buffalo Mountain Co-op, which expanded its inventory of more conventional products when it moved. Though the Plainfield Co-op hasn’t begun to sell products in the new location and doesn’t have a finalized date for its full opening, its leaders want to switch from a 70% to 30% ratio of organic to conventional products to a 60% to 40% balance.
The ratio “will evolve based upon what members and customers actually purchase,” said Robinson.
Matt Cropp, executive director of Vermont Employee Ownership Center, said the Plainfield Co-op came into being in the ’60s largely because community demands for organic and health-focused foods. He compared the co-op’s current transition to Burlington’s City Market’s decision to move downtown and add more conventional products to its inventory in 2000.
“When they moved downtown, the agreement they had with the city was that they would also stock conventional foods to sort of be able to be a grocery store that was more serving the needs of the whole city, not a subgroup of the city,” he said.
Transitions like those come with trade-offs, Cropp said. The same goes for adding more co-op members, he said, which the Plainfield outfit is hoping to do with scaling up.
“When you have an organization that has 10,000 members, right, and a board with like nine people, most people aren’t going to have personal knowledge of most of the board members,” he said. “And so there’s kind of a different relationship there, a bit more alienated and requires more intentional approaches to governance and community building, versus a smaller co-op that can kind of ride on the coattails of existing community social capital.”
Melissa Bounty, executive director of the Central Vermont Economic Development Corporation, worked with the Plainfield Co-op board on the move, which was one of the organization’s priority projects this year. She agreed there are tradeoffs when co-ops expand.
“The higher that number (of active members) goes, the better increase of capacity and support and services you would have,” she said. “You also do have more complexity to manage, and I can see how that could create problems.”
Robinson said the co-op board is looking into transportation arrangements to help locals get to the new store.
Some members such as Domino, the chief buyer, worry what leaving will mean for the vitality of the village, even while recognizing the co-op can’t thrive there anymore.
Domino has lived in Plainfield on and off throughout her life and said she’s always felt a strong sense of community cultivated by local stores such as the co-op. In recent years she’s seen many of those businesses shutter, such as the River Run restaurant in 2011 and Red Store filling station not long after.
“What will happen if the co-op also closes and leaves the village?” she asked. “What will be left here?”
Robinson said he feels some of the same emotions, but he is also optimistic the new location can maintain the co-op’s values and provide an all-in-one shopping experience.
“I’m okay and happy with the move, and I have some nostalgia. This is not binary,” he said. “You can have both of those things going on at the same time, right?”
Lucia McCallum writes for the Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship.
Lucia McCallum interns as the Hardwick Gazette's community resilience reporter with support from the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships. She works with editors at Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism program.
