Nothing General about this General Store
No one is a stranger at Cotuit Fresh Market.
Every road on Cape Cod leads to somewhere magical. One such place is Cotuit Fresh Market, the small general store referred to as the Coop by locals.
I took an immediate liking to Cotuit Fresh Market when I first stepped inside nearly a year ago to pick up a morning coffee and, what has become one of my guilty pleasures, a freshly made breakfast sandwich. Common to most New England general stores, Cotuit Fresh Market has a creaky wood floor, an assortment of goods central to its location including Cotuit coffee mugs, a variety of groceries, and an old wooden screen door that shuts with a particular slamming noise just the way the door of an old country store should sound. Both the front and back entrances have dog bowls with water which is not only thoughtful but also convenient if you happen to have your dog with you as I often do. If the dog bowl is empty you can bring it inside where they will gladly fill it with water. The Coop sells fresh almond croissants, fruits and vegetables, wine and beer, homemade cookies at the old wooden checkout counter, has an assortment of newspapers by the door, and even has a bathroom that can actually be used by the public. In the back of this happily congested welcoming store is a food preparation counter where you can order subs, sandwiches, homemade pizza, burgers, salads, french fries, chicken wings and, of course, a lobster roll. Each day Cotuit Fresh Market posts a sign outside their entrance which can be easily read if you are passing by advertising take-out dinners offered between 3:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. Different days offer different meals including Meatloaf Monday, Pot Pie Tuesday, “BBQ” Friday, and Pot Roast Saturday. Cotuit Fresh Market is also available for catering, and for the past two years has provided concessions at Lowell Park, home of Cotuit’s Cape Cod League baseball team, the Kettleers. Megan Burdick, who currently owns Cotuit Fresh Market along with her husband, Seth, told the Barnstable Patriot in 2018, “From the moment I stepped foot in here, it felt like home.” I couldn’t agree more.
Cotuit Grocery was originally located a short distance up the road from where it currently stands. A century ago it was on the corner of Main Street and the road to the Cotuit Town Landing. The general store was first opened by the Nickerson family in 1896 before being passed on to Frederick Parker. During World War I it was divided into shares owned by Parker, Benjamin Sears, Howard Dottridge, and Ulysses Hull, the combined ownership being the reason for its common name, the Coop, which identified it as a local cooperative. Milton Crocker, who began working at the store as a clerk in 1912, eventually owned all of the shares but still continued referring to his business as the Coop. When fire destroyed the original building in 1924, Crocker moved the store to its current location at 1337 Main Street. “Everything burned down and we lost most of the stock. But I was lucky. Next day we moved right in here,” Crocker told the Cape’s Register newspaper in 1982. “This had been a dry goods store but the old man who’d run it had died. I was only 30 then. I called up E.C. Hall in Brockton - they were my suppliers - and they sent down a truckload of stuff the very next day and I was back in business. My customers naturally had heard about the fire and they came right back,” said Crocker.
Milton Crocker famously owned and continued to work in his store until he passed away in January 1986 at the age of 91. Steven Gould, who had worked at the Coop as far back as 1968, purchased the property in 1987 and ran the store until 2009, pledging to maintain Crocker’s community-focused business acumen. After running the store for more than two decades, Gould turned control of the Coop over to Rich and Lori Pimental partnered by Scott and Sue Sampson under whose collaborative management it continued until it was purchased by current owners Seth and Megan Burdick in 2019. The Burdicks were helped during the transition despite the fact that they had been working as Coop staff since 2009. In the truest community sense, they were mentored by the Pimentals and Sampsons so that the local mission of the store would continue. “They taught us that owning a store is more than just selling things - it’s a responsibility that revolves around community, friends, and family,” Seth Burdick told the Barnstable Patriot in 2018.
Cotuit Fresh Market has lived up to that community responsibility and reputation. “It’s all family,” says Tim Burdick, who currently manages the Coop. “We bought it in 2019. It’s family owned. My mother’s in the kitchen right now,” Mr. Burdick said as he pointed out several other family members who were happily at work. “All the locals come in,” he continued. “Kettleers players are always in the store. This is the community center. It’s the first place people call if there are outages. It’s the only real place like this left in Cotuit besides the Kettle Ho,” Burdick said, referencing the town’s popular old tavern about a block away. I asked him if he felt a sense of responsibility in preserving the past while also attempting to run a successful business in a small Cape Cod town with a strong sense of its own history. “People remember around here, families like the Nickersons and the Scudders. But there are real people living here. There are a lot of times where I feel that, elsewhere, this has been lost. We want to keep it local and keep it moving. This is just the beginning.”
The irony about this general store is that there is nothing general about it. No one is a stranger at Cotuit Fresh Market, regardless of the season. “Cotuit is a together community, it’s close-knit,” says Burdick, intimating that such a label is more the exception than the rule these days. “I think there are some less community oriented places now where people just move through the checkout line with their heads down and they never even make eye contact, but that’s not here.” Burdick was then quick to offer his favorite part about working at Cotuit Fresh Market. “People here always greet you with a smile.”
As I left I couldn’t help but smile myself. After all, Dinner Tonight is Corned Beef 3-7.
