One thing that made winters difficult was energy costs combined with lower foot traffic. Libby picks up their story from here, “So the Community Loan Fund has offered a lifeline to us. We started trying to figure out the finances of the store and trying to find how to keep it viable in the winter. Kind of like tracking every dollar where all the money was going. And we really started looking into the core of the store itself, my electric, my heating, all of that. Why was everything so expensive? 

So we got an energy audit done. They came out, they did a massive audit on the store. They let us know that there was a lot of things that needed to be fixed, upgraded, no weatherization. We weren't energy efficient at all. So with that said, the Community Loan Fund came in to help me, along with the USDA, trying to find ways to get some of these projects done to kind of seal the building and stop the money literally going out the window. 

They offered us funding to be able to do all the upgrades that we needed that we may not have been able to do for at least ten years. That's a lot. It's also been really overwhelming. It was extremely stressful — especially because your head's just spinning with numbers and these are large numbers. 

It's something that you have to do. You can't turn a blind eye on it. So that was really stressful at the time. But then knowing that there was a game plan in place helped me a lot. And then knowing that the aid was there was huge.”

Fixing their floor and weatherizing their building put the Mill Village Country Store in a place to give back to their community. Annie told us about one instance, “Regarding the impact of town, we've had quite a bit of that. We've realized that we didn't even know what was here. For example, when we had the 42 inches of snowfall, there was an accident on the corner over here. And one of the power poles had gone down. 

So the fire station was out here all night, I think it was from 7pm. to early morning, standing out there doing signs and stuff. And, we’re friends with some of the firemen on the team and stuff, and they had messaged about dinner. So it was like 8pm. We turned on the pizza oven, started making pizzas.”

Libby and Annie shared another story how during the historic flooding, a lot of the elderly people in town got evacuated from their homes if they were close enough to the water. So they all stayed at a local school where emergency resources could be focused. The Mill Village Country Store was able to donate 10 pizzas to help feed everybody.