At Shagbark Customer Appreciation Day, Some Guise Go Grill Crazy

East Haddam’s Shagbark Lumber & Farm Supply typically cooks and serves 400+ hot dogs during a customer appreciation event.  They hold at least five, annually: Chick Day with the Easter Bunny, Grill Crazy Day near Father’s Day, a summertime Ice Cream Social, a Chili Cook Off and a Christmas Open House with Santa and photo opportunities with people and pets. 

Every day, by the main entrance, the store provides customers and employees with free popcorn, coffee and water.  Customer and employee retention are unusually high at Shagbark.

Clearly, Shagbark appreciates its customers as much as they appreciate Shagbark.  And at the recent “Go Grill Crazy” event, beercan chicken, Hummel hot dogs and soft drinks were served while local East Haddam band Some Guise pumped out classic soft rock favorites, tastefully.

This year, Shagbark celebrates its 25^th year anniversary, serving the East Haddam community and then some.  Co-owner Joanna Hunt reminisces: “The original part of the store was my Uncle Bud’s dairy farm.  When my brother, Fred, and I, were little, we grew up here, on the farm.”  

Though they lived in Montville, Joanna and Fred’s visits to Uncle Bud’s farms were frequent; they helped their uncle care for grandma, who suffered from Alzheimer’s.  After an early form of Lyme Disease in the ‘70’s enlarged Uncle Bud’s heart, thus rendering him unfit for the hard physical work of farming, he and nephew Fred started a new grain and feed store, as the one across the river, in Haddam, had just closed.  They gradually added hardware, expanded, partnered with Ace and then True Value Hardware.  

Since its start in 1986, Shagbark, the small feed and grain store, has been growing with the times and the communities it serves.  A part-time employee originally, Joanna Hunt came on board full time in the early ‘90’s, after Uncle Bud’s death.  At present, Shagbark Feed and Lumber has approximately 60 employees, full and part time.

The band, Some Guise, was started two years ago as an offshoot of the Community Music Circle run by Pete Govert, “The way we got the name, Some Guise, is because, first of all, all the good names were already taken, and, secondly, when the East Haddam Community Lions asked Pete to assemble a musical group for an ice cream social, I just said, ‘Some Guys (Guise) will come out and play,’ and that’s how the name came to be.”  Albeit a variable lineup, current members include Govert; Ken Tosi and son Evan Tosi; Jim Franchese and his son, Jeremy Franchese and Ray Smith.

As there is no set statewide Customer Appreciation Day in Connecticut, businesses typically chose a day in the year to acknowledge customer loyalty with special treats and sales.  As Shagbark does five or six such events, annually, they show their appreciation continually.

As longtime Shagbark appreciative customer and fan says, “I appreciate Shagbark because of the way they appreciate the customer coming in.  I have been coming here since ’86, and I will continue to do business with Fred because he takes care of people in the town and I do business with him because of that.”  

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