Veal embraces the spirit of convenience at his new store

For the last eight to 10 years when a citizen of Mitchell realized they needed a bottle of ketchup or bag of ice they had to make a roughly 12-mile round trip drive to Gibson and back to fill that need. Every day they had to make sure they had plenty of gas before going home for the night.

“It’s not that big a deal, but it is aggravating,” said Scott Veal, who has lived in Mitchell for 20 years. “It was just inconvenient if you wanted a bag of chips or a Hersey bar.”

Now he is doing something to remedy that situation. For the last year he has been remodeling the old gas station at the corner of Highway 102 and the Mitchell-Edgehill Road. He has now opened the only convenience store and gas station on the western end of Glascock County.

“We opened for Springfest, but we were not completely stocked up,” Veal said. “The last couple of weeks we’ve had our vendors coming in and we have it stocked and blocked like a sure enough store now.”

Open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday, with Sunday hours in the works, his store Rocket Food and Fuel is offering a wide selection of snacks and drinks, grocery staples, a few household goods and other useful items like motor oil and charcoal.

“We’re not going to replace your weekly trip to the grocery store, but if there’s some small item you need, we can save you a drive,” Veal said. “There’s the price of gas right now and if you have to go to Gibson and back that could take a whole gallon.”

The store also features a new kitchen.

“We’re cooking breakfast and lunch six days a week and we’re probably going to move into cooking at night too,” said Veal, who also owns Scott’s Place diner in Gibson, the Lil’ Dutch Bakery in Louisville and two months ago opened Scott’s Place restaurant in Wrens, in the location of the former Dutch House. “For now (in Mitchell) it’s just chicken strips, hamburgers, sandwiches, that kind of stuff. We’ll do pizza eventually and probably regular meals too, a meat and two, as we get more staff in place.”

The new gas pumps should be delivered in the next two weeks and Veal said he hopes to offer regular unleaded, non-ethanol fuel and diesel at the new store.

J.J. Cooper, who has been working for Veal managing the store and getting it ready to open, said he expects it will be an asset for visitors to nearby Hamburg State Park.

Veal said that he has plans to offer a selection of bait and tackle for fishermen and expand the shop area to offer some hardware items.

“Traffic has been really good,” Cooper said. “People are saying they are really happy to have something here.”

Veal said that the kitchen has been popular with area residents and employees of nearby Pulliam Lumber who stop to get breakfast on their way to work. Saturday was also a busy day for the store’s kitchen, which Veal ran himself. He hopes to have other cooks in place to take over there, but still plans to fill in when needed.

“It’s all about having good people,” he said. “JJ has done a lot to get this place open. I can tell him what I want and he does it. Having people like him, and the ones I have in Wrens, and in the last week I’ve hired an office manager to take more of a burden off of me."

Between the four businesses, two of which have opened in the last two weeks, he said that he is up to around 50 employees, significantly more than when he just had the Gibson diner four years ago. All of his business expansions have been tied to offers, whether it be for the property or the business itself, that he says he could not let pass.

“You focus on impact, you don’t focus on the money,” Veal said. “Think about what gets people excited, what it is they want. You can’t go into thinking I’ll make a dollar here and a dollar there. If you focus on the impact your business is having on people, the profitability will follow, you can watch it go up.”

He said that he is looking forward to being able to go back to the diner and run the register at lunch so he can talk to his customers and they can talk to Scott at Scott’s Place.

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Veal embraces the spirit of convenience at his new store