New owner taking over next week at Granton Convenience Store

Regular customers of the Granton Convenience Store in Granton will have to plan ahead this week as the store is undergoing a transition of ownership that will shut down the business on Aug. 16. After that, ProVision Partners Cooperative will be the new owners of the C-Store, located just off the Highway 10 curve on the south side of Granton.

Doug Becker, the owner and founder of the Granton C-Store, said the decision to sell his business to ProVision came rather quickly.

“I reached out to them,” he said. “My BP contract was up and you are in a contract to sell fuel for about 10 years. I decided to see if anyone was interested in buying the store. There was a few guys I met with, there was one gentleman from Chicago who came up to see the place but I didn’t want them buying it, so I reached out to ProVision and said, ‘Hey this is something I am interested in selling, are you interested?’ and the next day they came out to see the store. It all happened very quickly, in the past couple months.”

The Granton C-Store was established in 2003 by Becker while he and his father Ed were operating Becker’s Repair and Welding in the former Hubing’s Standard Service Station located on Granton’s Main Street. With its small auto shop and only one gas pump, Becker said they knew expansion was needed in order to thrive.

“Me and my family were running the old gas station as a repair shop,” he said. “It had only one grade of fuel at the pumps. We knew that if we wanted to grow we needed a better location.”

That better location turned out to be just a few curves down the road at the site of the old Livestock Auction Barn that had operated in Granton from the 1960s to the 1990s. After purchasing the property — which had an odd stipulation that forbade any livestock from ever being sold on the property — it became a two-year long process to tear down the humungous barn and build the Convenience Store in its place “In 2003 it was built,” Becker said. “We purchased the property in, I believe, 2000. But there is a weird stipulation in the deed that says you cannot sell livestock on the land anymore, it has something to do with the business that had bought the barn before and shut the operation down. We could never sell a horse up here. There was a sale barn here, a livestock auction barn. It was a two year process to tear down the whole building down and we even used some of the large beams to build the C-Store. There were large beams of 2x12s that were 25 feet long. They don’t have wood like that anymore.”

For the next 18 years, Becker ran the C-Store while also running MCRP Towing, a business he still intends to operate and expand upon after the reins of the C-Store are handed over to ProVision. Like any business, he said it had its struggles, but he was proud to have brought the C-Store to Granton.

“The opportunity was right to move on to other things,” he said. “I’m proud that me and my family had the guts to do it to expand and stay in Granton. That is a struggle for anyone starting a new business. It’s seven days a week at a time, it’s a hard job.”

With the transition of ownership to ProVision, Becker said all of the store’s current employees will remain with the business, as well as all of the products they sell, including pizza and sub sandwiches. The only major thing that will be changing, he said, will be the distributor of gasoline from BP to Cenex.

“Most everything will stay as it is, but the fuel will be handled by Cenex,” he said. “We plan on keeping all of the original staff. They also do not have any interest in changing our food program, they see what we have for pizza and subs and they want to keep that. All the contact information and hours will be staying the same.”

Aug. 15 will be the last day Becker will operate the C-Store before handing over control to ProVision on Aug. 16. On their first day, Becker said ProVision will be working on the pumps and signage at the station which will require the business to be completely closed for the day. Business is expected to resume as usual on Aug. 17.

“They’re going to be completely closed on Monday the 16th,” he said. “ We will be open business as usual on Sunday and after midnight the pumps will be turned off and there will be no sales on Monday at all until Cenex and ProVision reconfigures all of the registers and pumps.”

The Granton Convenience Store on the south side of Granton will be closed on Aug. 16 as ProVision Partners Cooperative prepares to take over operation of the business from the Becker family.

CHEYENNE THOMAS/STAFF PHOTO