Cha’s Convenience Store opens gas station across state line from Northfield
Published: 10-17-2024 4:12 PM |
WINCHESTER, N.H. — While there remains no gas station in Northfield, Massachusetts, residents can now fill up their vehicles at a small business one-tenth of a mile past the state line.
Cha’s Convenience Store started selling Mobil gasoline at 860 Manning Hill Road a month ago, though the convenience store items will remain in its 1987 building across the street for roughly another three to four weeks.
“It’s been going well. It was definitely a needed item [for the area], anyways,” owner Marshall Royce said Wednesday in his new 12,000-square-foot facility’s seating area.
Northfield has not been home to a gas station in at least 12 years. Town Administrator Andrea Llamas said she believes Northfield has functioned well without one because modern vehicles use less fuel than those manufactured in previous decades, but she understands the appeal to having one in Winchester.
“I hope that it’s actually a benefit to the residents, that there is a closer place that has a reasonable gas price and residents can go there, if they’re going in that direction,” Llamas said.
At 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, three of the four vehicles getting gas at Cha’s bore Massachusetts license plates.
Llamas added that most gas stations make the bulk of their profit on convenience store items and she hopes Northfield’s small businesses don’t lose customers. Royce, 50, said he has no desire for that to happen, though he acknowledged it is possible.
“I would never actively try to do that,” he said.
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Once opened, the store is expected to be the largest non-truck-stop convenience store in New England and will employ 25 to 30 people, up from approximately 15. The new spot will carry all of Cha’s typical merchandise — including alcohol, Asian groceries, cigarettes and premium cigars — and will feature the addition of Lottery tickets, food service and coffee. There are 10 lanes of standard gas pumps and four lanes of diesel.
“This is almost like a welcome center to New Hampshire,” Royce said of the land he purchased with a dream in mind in 1995 and started building on a year ago. “We will close across the street one night and open the next morning here.”
He explained his parents opened Cha’s Convenience Store at 841 Manning Hill Road with $500 and a two-bay garage in 1985, moving next door into its longtime building two years later. That building will initially be used for storage but its long-term fate is unknown.
“Of course it’s going to be sad. My parents started it. I grew up here,” he said. “It’s the end of an era, start of a new one. But, you know, things changed. That is definitely a quintessential ’80s convenience store — this is not.”
Royce said the business is named after his mother, a silversmith and jeweler by trade. The original store initially sold gemstones but hasn’t carried that type of inventory since the late 1980s or early ’90s. He said the store has been open every day since 1987 and he intends to keep that tradition at the new location.
Reach Domenic Poli at: dpoli@recorder.com or 413-930-4120.