TURNERS FALLS — The Country Creemee ice cream shop is set to move into a new home on Avenue A within the month, but its owners are missing a crucial part of the business — all the ice cream-making equipment.
Owner Cynthia Ahearn said nearly all the equipment the business uses — aside from the refrigerators and freezers, which they own — were leased along with the building on Millers Falls Road they were ordered to vacate. Now, she said the business is looking at an estimated $75,000 price tag to purchase the ice cream machines, topping counter, deli counter, snow cone machine and other equipment the shop needs.
Ahearn said her daughter set up an online GoFundMe campaign to try to help raise money, but after reading a number of “awful, nasty” comments on Facebook, Ahearn said she asked her daughter to take the campaign down after only two or three hours.
“I thought, ‘I’m not even going to go there with that because they’re not getting the story.’ We don’t have any equipment, we have to start out all new,” Ahearn said. “They think we’re millionaires, I guess. They don’t realize the work that’s involved and the equipment you have to put in there.”
She added she was uncomfortable asking for money in the first place, but gave her daughter the go-ahead because she had heard of a number of other local businesses holding similar fundraisers, and many people told her GoFundMe was a good idea.
“I said, ‘I don’t like going out begging for money,’ but they said everybody else does it when they’re hurting like this,” she said.
The Millers Falls Road shop, which housed the Creemee for 23 years, had three ice cream machines, which, according to Ahearn, cost $26,000 each. She said a new deli counter runs for between $1,200 and $1,500.
“We’re going to try and get a loan and go out and buy new equipment. It’s going to be expensive, but that’s the only way we can do it,” she said.
Ahearn added she’ll probably start with two ice cream machines at the new location until she can see how well the business does there. She said she’s currently doing research online and is going to look at some used equipment the former owner of Twisters is selling.
“I don’t know if it’s anything we can use or not,” she said. “To replace all that equipment that we had there, it’s going to be a lot of money.”
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