LUDLOW — When 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene flooded the local Shaw’s — the only supermarket in a half-hour radius of this Windsor County town of 2,172 residents — the chain rented a tent and created its first-ever canvas commissary during the cleanup.
A dozen years later, another historic rainfall has swamped the Route 103 store near Okemo Mountain Resort, spurring Shaw’s employees to again juggle mopping while moving temporarily under a tarp.
This time, it’s Tent 2.0.
Back when flooding from Irene shuttered the store, contractors replaced concrete flooring, conduits and cable as employees set up shop in the parking lot. Scaling down their usual 20,000 items to the best-selling 700, they traded newfangled barcodes and laser beams for old-fashioned price tags and punch-key cash registers.
“For them to open a tent within 10 days of Irene,” the head of the Okemo Valley Regional Chamber of Commerce said at the time, “to serve the community and save their employees’ jobs — it’s a very honorable thing.”
This week, Shaw’s is bringing back its canopy. But instead of stocking it with merchandise, the New England chain is moving forward with online ordering.
People who log on to the store’s website can sign up or sign in, choose the Ludlow Shaw’s zip code 05149, shop by clicking on items, then select a time for pickup in the parking lot.
Shaw’s reported flooding this month at several of its Vermont and New Hampshire stores, although its Ludlow location is the only one still closed.
“We are incredibly thankful for our associates and vendor partners that have been working around the clock to address the damage,” company spokesperson Teresa Edington said.
The chain doesn’t yet know how the Ludlow cleanup will compare to the nearly five months required between the August 2011 storm and January 2012 store reopening. But the new tent is rekindling memories for locals who found it one of Irene’s few silver linings.
A dozen years ago, what began that summer as a 3,200-square-foot canopy of household essentials grew during the fall into a nearly 6,000-square-foot tent city stocked to satisfy both milk-chugging townspeople and Champagne-toasting tourists.
Without wiring, the makeshift market plugged into backup generators and batteries that could power simple cash registers (“Shaw’s Country Store,” the receipts said) but not space-age scales or scanners. That forced employees to stick price tags on individual items and sell produce by the piece rather than the pound.
Shoppers ate it up — even as the occasional tourist, not knowing how to digest it, mistook the tent for a donation station or, on the flip side, a sign the town was so backward, it had yet to discover bricks and mortar. In a 2011 column, Connecticut ski writer Chris Dehnel relayed his fellow visitors’ reaction.
“Wow, that must be some holiday turkey drive,” he quoted one as saying.
“That is not for a special event,” a local replied. “That is the supermarket.”
