Vermontcountrystore Coupons
The Vermont Country Store was founded by my parents, Vrest and Ellen Orton. My Dad had clear memories of growing up in the general store owned by my Grandfather, Gardner Lyman Orton, in North Calais, Vermont, which was started the year my Dad was born in 1897. Those memories resulted in our first catalogue consisting of 12 pages and 36 items, printed in our garage print shop and mailed to my parents' Christmas card list in late 1945. The store opened in the spring of 1946 and to everyone's amazement people found their way along dirt roads to the small village of Weston, population 475 at that time. Weston has now grown to almost 600 people The business was greatly aided by a full-length article in the 1952 Saturday Evening Post, entitled "The Happy Storekeeper of the Green Mountains". There was hardly a soul in America who did not read the Post in those days. I grew up learning the art of storekeeping that was based on my Grandfather's principles of finding useful, functional products that the farm families of northern Vermont could not easily find elsewhere, or make themselves. It was from these principles that our motto, "We sell products that don't come back, to people who do," was born. What we learned in the store, face to face with our customers, we put to practice in our catalogue. In the 1950s and '60s there was a certain amount of distrust against mail ordering, given the suspect offers on matchbooks so we had to overcome that. My father told the story of going to visit Mr. Bean for advice that was brief and to the point: "Don't oversell your products. It's better for customers to open the package and have the item be better than you said it was." Using that advice along with our ironclad guarantee, we built trust with our mail order customers.