Open at Last
If you’ve been following the construction progress of the shop in the Pear Tree car park, you’ll know that it’s been a long but steady job that is now finally complete! We had a tremendous opening weekend over the late May bank holiday. Everything went smoothly, our volunteers have enjoyed getting behind the till again and we've had some lovely feedback from customers. It was great to see so many people chatting on the deck and children enjoying ice-creams in the sunshine on Saturday. As well as many villagers, we were visited by our local MP, a few of our local councillors and the community PCSO.
In fact, Saturday's takings were quite staggering (record-breaking!) and Sunday and Monday also very strong, with an astonishing 350 customer transactions over our first 3 days. Thank you to everyone who came in to chat, browse and shop with us. We were entirely cleaned out of bread, milk, meat and eggs, so please bear with us whilst we refine our ordering quantities and frequencies of popular product lines over the first few weeks.
Remember, that we stock all the regular daily newspapers and you can request one to be put on one side for you if you wish – for however many or few days a week as you like. We can also get in any magazine that you might expect to find in a good newsagent, so pop in and talk to one of the volunteers if you would like us to supply your favourite magazine for you.
Alongside all our everyday essentials and convenience store staples, we have a growing selection of local crafts and products, including:
● Beer from the Electric Bear Brewing Company in Bath
● Nailsea Cider from Sam, who lives just an apple’s throw from the shop
● Whitley Chilli Farm products are on the way
● Greeting cards featuring scenes from the local area produced by Evan Hall Photography and local artist Richard Bill. Our popular local photo cards featuring photographs taken and submitted by villagers will be back, and Pam Burton is recycling your old greetings cards into new ones to send again – plus more in the pipeline, so we have a great selection to suit all occasions
● Wooden crafts by Peter Hatherell
● Candles and reed diffusers from Ellie of Flora and Wick
● Glasswork created by Georgina
● Honey products and gifts from local bees kept by Emma of The Bee’s Knees
● Beautiful bags crocheted by villager, Michelle
● Soaps and body butter by Mamma Thea of Lacock
If you create something you think we could add to our craft area, please get in touch at creative@whitleystores.org. Our aim is to rotate suppliers on a rolling 6-weekly basis, so that there is always something new to choose from in the shop.
If you’ve been in and thought – quite rightly – that it looks like fun and you would like to join our bank of volunteers, please get in touch at volunteers@whitleystores.org or talk to one of the volunteers in the shop. We could do with a few more weekend volunteers, so we would particularly welcome anyone who could spare two hours on a Saturday afternoon every other week, or in the middle of the day on a Sunday.
If you haven’t been in yet, do come and visit. Our opening hours are:
Monday to Friday 9–5
Saturday 9–5
Sunday 10–4
