After 52 years in business, a Perryville institution will close its doors in the coming months, and for many of its faithful customers, this will be a tough pill to swallow.
On Monday, Farm Fresh grocery store owner Ron Courtois publicly announced that he would be retiring from the store where he has worked since he was 12 years old.
“My parents, Richard and Theresa Courtois, owned the store,” he said while standing behind the checkout counter at the small grocery store located across the street from Perryville City Hall at 218 N. West St. “They just had me doing stuff that I could do — filling the shelves. They were down here the whole day when they first started. I had to be down here too, for the most part, when I wasn’t out doing kid stuff.”
Courtois thinks he bought the store from his parents in 1991, but he isn’t exactly sure of the date. Since he’d been working at the store most of his life by then, he said that becoming the owner wasn’t that big of a deal.
“I’d been here the whole time, so it was just sort of like changing roles, moving up a bit,” he said. I was already doing a lot when I took it over.”
Courtois has fond memories of the store and the community it served. His parents, who are no longer living, opened the store when the local IGA grocery informed Richard that he would have to start paying for the use of the section of the store where he sold bottled milk. Realizing the additional cost would cut deeply into his profits, Richard contacted the owner of Farm Fresh, who told him that this was becoming a common practice in the business and suggested he open his own store where he could sell the milk. And that’s exactly what he did.
“It was always a convenience grocery store, and we had milk in glass bottles for a long time,” Courtois said. “We sold a tremendous amount of milk that was bottled in Chester. I sold as much milk for the dairy as the store in Belleville, Ill., did — and they had 35,000 people in that town.”
The company stopped selling the milk in bottles around four years ago.
“I had to wait for them to finish bottling it,” Courtois said. “I’ve had milk on my truck that never stopped until it got in my cooler. It was that fresh.
As one might imagine, when you own a store that has been a part of the community for 52 years, you make a lot of friends in the course of doing business.
“A lot of business friends and just people coming in every day became friends,” Courtois said. “They'd come by and get a soda and shoot the breeze for a while. Yeah, them guys are gone now too, some of them.”
Asked when he would close the doors for the last time, Courtois said, “Well, it’ll be a couple of months. We’ll try to sell down. I’ll have people come in and buy stuff and different things. I’ve never done this before, so it’s kind of a learning experience, but I’ve got people helping me figure out what to do.”
Courtois explained that he made the decision to close the store when the building was sold.
“So, I’m going to retire,” he said. “That’s the good thing about it.”
Courtois wants to thank the community for its years of support of his family’s business and hopes that people will realize how important it is to support small businesses like his.
“I wrote a letter to the editor about small businesses in Perryville, and there’s tons of them,” he said. “I went to go name them, and I thought, ‘Here’s going to be a problem. They’re going to get to reading all these names, and they’re going to quit reading the letter, so I didn’t put them in there.
“Plus, I was afraid I was going to forget somebody because I had a list of 25 to 30 family businesses in town. It was unbelievable. You know, you get to thinking how some of them started in the backyard and now it’s Robinson Construction. You know what I’m saying” They’re nationwide. It’s amazing in small towns how many family-owned businesses there have been for generations.”
Courtois believes that much of the success of the Farm Fresh store was the result of it being small.
“We’ve just been a little grocery store where you come in and get your stuff,” he said. “They need a gallon of milk; they park right here. They walk in and get a gallon of milk, and they’re out the door in a minute or two. You want to get milk at a big store, it takes longer to get the milk than it does to get in and out of here — and then there’s the line. I’ve had a lot of people upset already about me closing the store. They come in, get their stuff, and out the door they go.”
And as far as retirement goes, Courtois has no idea how he’s going to spend his time.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said. “I’m going to retire first and then figure it out.
