LAPPE — Residents of this rural community are anxiously awaiting the opening of a new convenience store, more than two years since the only shop in the area closed.
"The Store on 591" will likely see an influx of customers from Lappe, Trout Lake, Surprise Lake and vicinity when it starts up on July 29.
It's just up the road from the store that went out of business in early 2023.
"We grew up out here," said Kelsey Clements, who owns the new outlet along with her parents and her husband. "The old store was a staple in our life, our childhood and our adulthood as well. I remember being a kid and riding my bike with my friends to go get ice cream, and that was so important."
Its closure left a big gap in the community, something she looks forward to rectifying.
"We're going to have a whole lot of new memories...Everyone's super-excited. I made a brief post about a week-and-a-half ago, and ever since then, every time a vehicle goes by, people are honking and 'thumbs up' out the window."
Clements works in the healthcare field, her husband's in engineering, and her parents previously operated an auto repair business on Highway 591.
For all of them, she said, this is a brand new experience.
"My parents owned another small piece of property, and one night we were talking about it, and how they were going to sell it, and I jokingly told them 'You should build a store there.' It kind of ran from there. It went from a crazy idea to all of a sudden, the building's up and we're about to open."
Clements added that it's been an "absolutely huge learning curve...to be honest, we've had no idea what we were doing the whole time."
The family succeeded in figuring things out, but did encounter some surprises.
"We started this process a couple years ago, just thinking that we would put up a building, put some stuff in it, start selling it, not understanding the red tape behind ever step along the way."
One of the first big hurdles was getting approvals to put a driveway in, a process that took about ten months.
Now that the opening is barely a week away, Clements said the family is grateful for the support it's received from other businesses in the area and from the community in general.
The Store on 591 will sell typical convenience store items but will also offer food items from Pinetree Catering, including breakfast sandwiches and breakfast wraps every day.
"People can pick up a coffee and a breakfast wrap before they head to work. Then there are a couple other things that are in the process but not approved yet – propane and an LCBO outlet, which everyone's super-excited about up here. Within the next month or two, we should have a fully-stocked store, but it's all kind of one step at a time right now," Clements said.
She recalled how "This was almost a dream at the beginning, and maybe even a joke between us, and here we are now."
