SARANAC LAKE - The Community Store is drawing national media, and U.S. Rep. Bill Owens made his first visit there on Tuesday.
Community Store board members Melinda Little, Alan Brown and Gail Brill led Owens on a brief tour of the store, which opened its doors last month. Organizers sold half a million dollars worth of $100 shares to get the business off the ground. It offers basic goods - everything from underwear to bedsheets - some of which people in Saranac Lake had a hard time finding locally after the community lost its Ames department store in 2002.
Owens said he was "amazed" by the quantity and quality of the merchandise offered, and he praised the store's organizers for their five-year effort to make it happen.
"This is really the American sprit," Owens told the Enterprise after the tour. "This is people in a small town getting together to solve a problem. I was saying to them that there's probably a lot of other communities in the Northeast but probably throughout the United States which would like to follow this model: a small town, focused on the things that people need, able to change their inventory selection based upon community input.
"I'm just wholly impressed, and I also understand the tremendous amount of work that people who are running this put in, not only for the past five years, but will as they roll forward."
Owens presented Little, Brown and Brill with an American flag that had flown over the nation's Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Little said business at the Community Store has been steady since a ribbon-cutting ceremony last month. An official grand opening was held this past weekend.
Meanwhile, the store has been getting plenty of publicity, not just locally, but around the state, across the country and even in Canada. It was profiled in local newspapers and also in the Albany Times Union. The New York Times ran a long feature about the Community Store in its Nov. 13 business section. The same story was also published in the Toronto Star. The Powell Tribune in Powell, Wyo. published a story about the store last week. Powell is home to The Merc, a community-owned department store that served as the model for organizers of Saranac Lake's store. A television crew from CBS's "The Early Show" was also in Saranac Lake recently to record a feature on the store that was scheduled to air this morning.
