Longtime Xpresso Mart employee Patrick Murphy says he will miss seeing the store’s regular customers.
Former Xpresso Mart owners Neal and Laura Stites are putting the building up for lease.Signal Mountain residents now have one less option for coffee, ice cream and gas following last month’s closing of the Xpresso Mart that welcomed motorists to the top of the mountain.
Two years after the move to the town in 2010, Neal and Laura Stites revamped the old gas station into a coffee and ice cream shop offering ethanol-free gas in a retro setting. At the time, their three daughters were in school, and Laura Stites said they decided to purchase the property to become more connected to the community.
They planned to run the business, a second career for the couple, for a decade at most, but ended up keeping it open for 14 years.
“The store had been more successful than we’d ever imagined,” she said, adding that it had around 300-400 visitors per day. “That’s astounding for such a humble little place.”
Now empty-nesters sorely in need of a vacation, she and her husband decided to close Xpresso Mart. She said they plan to find someone to lease the building.
“It’s been a really great experience for us,” Laura Stites said of running the business. “The people we met along the way were really just the best.”
Among those people is Patrick Murphy, who has worked part time at the store for the past decade. Murphy said he was hired after stopping in the store for gas upon noticing that someone had cleaned it up and reopened it, and discovered that one of the new owners, Neal Stites, was a former classmate from Notre Dame High School.
“You couldn’t ask for kinder, more generous people to work for,” said Murphy.
For example, he said that in the weeks before his mother passed away, Laura Stites would come by and sit with him while his mother slept. She also deposited extra money in his bank account those weeks, and when he realized it, she just told him, “Money is the last thing you need to worry about right now.”
When the couple decided to close the business, they considered how it would affect their five employees, another of whom worked there for 10 years, approaching each one individually and offering to help them find new jobs.
Aside from the consideration shown by the Stiteses, Murphy said he loved working at Xpresso Mart because it helped him get to know everyone in the community.
“I watched practically a whole generation grow up,” he said, adding that he’s been invited to several customers’ high school graduations. “It was a wonderful little community store.”
The former Xpresso Mart, located at 816 Ridgeway Ave., is available for lease, and anyone interested may call Harmony Properties at 886-2040.