An institution in Charlotte has closed because of a shortage of workers.
The Old Brick Store shut its doors Sunday, owner Whitney Williamson Finley confirmed in a telephone conversation this week.
“We will be closing until we can find enough staff,” Erich Finley, Whitney’s husband, said in a follow-up email.
The beloved store has a long history — dating back to 1853.
Whitney bought it in 2015.
The store has a deli and offers homemade salads and meals. It makes sandwiches and pizza. It sells beer, wine, and fresh baked cookies and pastries. The store prides itself on selling local products, such as raw honey and maple syrup. It also serves coffee.
Kelli Varela of Shelburne showed up Monday morning as she had most mornings this summer to buy coffee and baked goods for contractors remodeling a house in Charlotte when she saw the sign:
“Closed due to no help. Do you want to help?”
Varela calls the store a staple.
“This is the cutest little place,” Varela said in a phone interview. “It’s the only thing around with morning coffee and lunch. There was always a line.”
The shortage of workers is hitting at a bad time.
“This is our gangbuster month and time of year,” Erich said. “Last Saturday we did 120 sandwiches and 80 breakfast sandwiches, but if you can’t hire people. …”
Whitney said she had 10 part-time employees, and eight left within a week of each other. She had mostly college students working for her and some high school students who are now going to school.
“This happens every August,” she said. “We lose our summer staff.”
Typically, she can hire for the fall and usually employs five part-time employees year-round.
This time, there are two plus her.
Foliage season is coming up, and she said she needs more employees.
“I am not that optimistic,” Whitney said. “I put out ads. I got one person. Every other business in the area is hiring.”
Her husband is more hopeful.
“I don’t know how long it’s going to take,” Erich said.
The store requires long hours from Whitney. She works there from 5 to 10 a.m., then goes home to take care of their children. She returns to the store to close, which means she is there until 8 or 9 p.m.
“It’s a hard job, and it’s a lot of work,” Erich said. “I just see my wife working and her employees and how hard they work.”
Whitney said she was offering $14 an hour to start. In addition, she said, employees made tips of $5 to $10 an hour each.
“It definitely feels strange,” Erich said of the closure.
He finds it somewhat ironic that the store is closing now.
“During the pandemic, we just had the window open, and it was pretty good,” he said. “We had people order all their groceries from us.
That fizzled after 10 or 11 months as people went back to the stores.”
Erich, who works in the corporate world, sees friends making lateral moves. He said the store’s full-time employees are making similar moves.
He said the store may have to change its business model. He suggests it may focus more on baking.
“Our baked goods are sold out by 9 a.m., and there are hundreds of them,” Erich said.
Whitney suggests she may close earlier in the day.
She said most of the business the store does is breakfast and lunch except for workers picking up six-packs of beer after work. Because of the shortage of help, she said she is considering stopping making breakfast and lunch sandwiches to order, and making them ahead of time.
She does all the baking every morning.
“It might mean an earlier shift,” without the needed help in the store, she said. “Everything is up in the air right now.”
“You kinda just want to get back into business,” he said.
Some have suggested to Erich that the store faces too much competition now, with the Red Onion Cafe, Philo Ridge Farm and Stone’s Throw Charlotte, a pizza place, but he maintains that the cluster of businesses is actually good for traffic at the Old Brick Store because each business offers something different.
“We’re not a Philo Ridge Farm,” he said of the Charlotte farm that serves dinner.
Others had suggested to them that traffic from Essex, New York, kept the store going. The ferry closed for a while during the pandemic. The duo said they get some customers from the ferry, as they are on the way from the ferry to Route 7, but most of their customers are local.
“It’s not ferry traffic that supports us. It’s the locals every day,” Erich said.
“I feel like we’ve let them down,” he said.
