Photo by Allen Dennis

Ryan Craig has owned and operated the Berkshire Country Store in Norfolk since 2017. Norfolk Now recently sat down with him to ask about the store and what it’s like being a small business owner in the Northwest Corner. 

NN: Let’s dive in deep: Most popular sandwich?

RC: In terms of sales, the Philly Steak.

NN: Most popular grocery item?

RC: We don’t have one!

NN: Why is that?

RC: If you ask most people in town what they’re thankful for with the store here, it’s “Thank God I can get a gallon of milk or groceries.” In reality, that represents a very small percentage of my business. To be honest, I think my business would do better without the groceries. What gets supported is people come in and out and buy food from the deli. In a town as small as this, even if 70 percent of the population is semi-loyal to getting their paper towels here, it still doesn’t represent a large spot. I have 160 grocery items on a list that haven’t sold in 90 days. 

NN: Do you get grocery requests from customers? 

RC: I get a lot of one-off requests that I can’t necessarily facilitate, but I’d like to. Someone thought we should sell fresh, butchered meat. I tried to think of all the ways I would have to modify this place to make that work. But I can tell them, “You know, I carry a local beef in the cooler that’s raised in Cornwall that’s grass fed and grass finished.” 

NN: What’s the best part of being a small business owner in the Northwest Corner?

RC: The best part is always the people! It’s encouraging, especially during Covid, to be providing jobs in the Northwest Corner, where jobs are not plentiful. But it’s also to provide customers with a place that can be a bright spot in their day. I try hard to make sure of that. I want people to be able to come in here and get what they’re looking for and enjoy their time in what’s otherwise a hectic world. Both employees and customers—I like the interpersonal interactions. 

NN: How many jobs have you created?

RC: I’ve employed over 100 people since coming to Norfolk. Some worked for one day or one month. Some three months. Some five years.  

NN: What’s the biggest challenge for a small business owner in this area?

RC: Right now is the hardest time I’ve ever had owning a business. The costs of goods are changing so rapidly. You almost need a full-time employee to analyze market data and make changes to pricing as needed. And prices keep going up. Some customers understand. They like the store, and they like to support local. But the higher those prices go, the more their wallets are strained. A guy who stops in here five days a week for lunch, when I’m forced to raise my prices a dollar and then another dollar—now all of a sudden a sandwich is $12 or $13 instead of $8 or $9—that person considers that maybe they need to start packing their lunch. In raising the prices, I hurt myself. Then there’s the cost of labor going up $1 an hour every year until we get to $15 an hour. We’re at $13 an hour today. By end of summer, we’ll be at $14. 

The product shortages are really awful, too. I can’t get the original chicken breast that we and our customers like. I get a secondary one and the first day I put it out on a sandwich I got a one-star review on Yelp that said, “the chicken breasts are a little small.” My back’s up against the wall. It’s either that or don’t sell any chicken. 

NN: What’s next for the Berkshire Country Store?

RC: My immediate focus right now is just refining the inventory. Making sure everything is stocked the way it needs to be, but not too stocked. There’s a lot of money tied up in inventory if it’s just sitting. We’ve got a sale table out right now; this is all product we’ve discontinued. We encourage people to take advantage of it. But also, if they really like the product, to say something and re-commit to buying because otherwise it’s going to disappear from the shelves. We’re going to continue to scale back our groceries. And we will continue to work on our fresh options. Kelly, the kitchen manager, has her own private baking business. She is working to improve our baked goods selection. She’s baked macaroons, brownies, eclairs, cannoli. We’re revamping the pastry case and we’re going to offer cakes again. We’re getting ready to launch a big focus on that and hope that people will come around and support us. 

—Interview by Kelly Kandra Hughes