Despite supply issues, rising costs and pandemic concerns, House By the Side of the Road, which is celebrating 50 years, is having its best year on record.
“Sales are up 20% from last year and last year was our best year ever,” said Abby McFarland, owner of the Wilton garden center.
Last year, the garden center’s customers started to buy a lot more houseplants.
“I’m assuming it’s due to people being home and getting back to doing things for the home,” said McFarland. “Our Christmas trees are gone – they sold out on the fifth,” she said. “We sold out the ninth last year, which was a record for us then.”
McFarland said a rumor got started around August that was going to be difficult to get a Christmas tree this year, but it was the synthetic ones that were difficult to get. With shipping and supply demands, things are taking longer to get in and costing a bit more, but they’ve been showing up eventually.
“Prices started to creep up,” said McFarland. “It affects our prices a dollar here and there.”
Mike Shea, the president and CEO of Jaffrey-based Belletetes, said the home-improvement store’s sales are a little ahead of last year, but it’s difficult to predict supply shortages. They also sold out of holiday items such as lights and tree stands, and had to replace them at a higher cost.
“Once something becomes scarce it takes a considerable amount of time for product to start flowing again, to get caught up with,” he said.
The majority of Belletetes’ sales come from lumber and building materials, which has stayed strong with the high demand for housing.
“We are not in a vacuum; everybody out there competing for sales is also experiencing the same challenges,” said Shea. “They’re experiencing increase costs and there’s a lot of external forces besides just the supply chain, such as trucking, fuel prices and labor.”
Shea said sales-level positions have been difficult to fill.
“Despite all these problems, it’s not doom and gloom,” he said.
Shea said things have been worse during different periods in the economy.
“I’ve been around for three economic recessions, going back to the savings-and-loan crises of the late ’80s and early ’90s, to the dot-com bubble burst, to the mortgage crisis back in 2007 to 2009,” he said.
For Shea, his biggest fear is inflation and interest rates rising, which has typically been an phenomenon of inflation.
At Steele’s Stationers in Peterborough, co-owner Bill Littles said his sales and foot traffic have been similar to last year, which was good for him, but with a projected 10% decrease. Prior to last year, major retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy opened on Thanksgiving Day, but most retail stores opted to close for the holiday. Littles said it helped boost shopping the day after, but he hasn’t seen the 30 percent leaps in retail sales that he heard were predicted for this year.
“This year’s Plaid Friday is, I think, the best we’ve ever had,” he said. “It’s been eight or 10 years now that we’ve done Plaid Friday and it’s seemingly built every year. Local people really get into it, bring their guests and make a day of it.”
“Things are definitely looking up, but the other side of the coin is New Hampshire is going into a weird time,” Littles said, referring to the COVID-19 pandemic. “We are worse than we’ve ever been right now and a lot of people aren’t paying attention to it, a lot of people are fed up with it.”
Littles said since vaccinations became available, he has noticed a slight decrease in shoppers.
“Once people got their second vaccines, it was like, ‘I can now do things,’ and we started seeing less and less people,” he said. “They were traveling, they could go do things [whereas] before they were just local. When the vaccines came, which was good, and you could see people, which was good, it changed to back to normal life and they had a wider range of areas they could go.”
Littles said the shop is just now receiving summer shipments that were ordered in spring, and he has canceled orders because they still haven’t shipped.
“I haven’t been able to get foam core in three months” he said. “We order things and sometimes get only six out of 40 items. It’s been happening for a year-and-a-half. It started with the tanker in the middle of the Suez Canal. Everything snowballed out of that.”
Anything container-shipped has been held up, but Littles said he hasn’t seen as many issues with local or air-freighted items.
“For instance, cigars are container-shipped,” he said. “Sometimes we wait three, four months for one.”
He also said they are struggling to get items with computer chips.
“You have to just roll with it,” said Littles. He orders extra of what he can if he suspects the item will be in short supply later on.
Finding steady help, keeping supplies stocked and recovering from last year’s nearly nonexistent hospitality industry has been a journey. At the Jack Daniels Motor Inn in Peterborough, where Eric Lorimer is the co-owner with his wife Pam, sales numbers have returned to a pre-pandemic state, but also at a cost.
“It’s pretty much been brute force,” he said. “We worked extra hours and filled in the gaps.”
Paper and cleaning supplies have been difficult to get in on time, but Lorimer is ordering ahead of time and finding replacements as needed. He has four staff members who have stayed at the inn throughout the up and downs of the last two years and after a summer-long search hired additional housekeeping staff earlier this year.
“January through March this year was pretty slow, like all of 2020,” he said. “Starting in mid-April we’ve been a little bit busier, so were are now back to to 2019 numbers.”
The inn was fully booked through Thanksgiving weekend this year by friends and family in town visiting. Lorimer and his wife worked over the holiday to give staff some time off.
Retail store owners are thankful for loyal customers and give credit to an appreciation of local shopping in the area. Customers at Steele’s were buying gifts simply to celebrate people — such as balloons to put on lawns — and Littles sold out of Christmas cards last year.
“They would go overboard trying to do things for people,” said Littles. “They were writing—wanting to be in touch with people as best they could.”
At House by the Side of the Road, McFarland said, “Our puzzle sales have increased by probably 300 percent. Thank you to everybody, because it’s been awesome.”