A below-water-level viewing window lets children watch the fish swimming by, and identification charts help visitors learn about the four main species in the ponds.įrom May through September Snappy's hosts groups of children and families. Nine years ago he built a courtyard behind the store with batting cages and a pair of fishing ponds. In that effort, he established a family and community atmosphere at Snappy's. "We want to be accessible to all, to good, wholesome people." "We don't want to be a high-brow store," he said. Value comes in a lot of ways," including the attention to detail and behaviors he tries to instill in his employees, "but it all starts with the people." "And don't make price the first priority. "For me, I've just got to be myself, be humble, take care of people," he said. In fact, he said, in retail it can be a recipe for empty parking lots if the store owner just doesn't know what he's doing. Lupton learned a quarter-century ago that bigger is not necessarily better. The head of the ball sports department is an avid team-sports backer. Those in the fishing department often go fishing in their off time. The gun department is staffed by folks who love shooting sports. "We try to put people in their niche," he said. And it's important to him that people are happy when they come to work. "You've got to show it by example, try to talk it and teach it and gently correct it if needed," he said. Meet customers with safe parking lots, friendly smiles, clean restrooms, product knowledge and honored warranties, he tells them.
If he and the staff put people first, he said, the customer feels cared about. He chalks it up to the quality of people who hire on at the store.īut Lupton also takes care to set the tone. "I could leave for a month and everything would purr." "They're awesome, they're an incredible group of people," Lupton said of his 28 full-time and six part-time workers. Some of those key people are his employees, who tend to stay with him for a long time. "And the biggest blessing was the people." It's been great, it's been a huge blessing," Lupton said. Getting out of hardware and focusing on sporting goods has paid off. "We also knew we couldn't be everything to everybody," he said. It helped prompt his 1989 move to join a national buying group based in Lewistown called Sports Inc., giving him greater buying power and previously impossible product relationships with major vendors. Lupton already had introduced footwear by then, and started bringing in more boats and marine products.īoth customer demand and his personal interest in sports accounted for the product-line shifts, he said. Snappy's had gotten out of the service station business in 1976, groceries were dropped around 1978, then hardware and building supplies were dropped in 1985. Verne Lupton stayed very active in the business for another few years after B.J.'s return, then the younger Lupton bought the store in 1977 and accelerated the sporting-goods growth. He loved it, he said, and the years stretched into decades. came back from four years of college and service in the Navy to help out his dad for a short time. A new 5,200-square-foot store opened a year later just to the south, with its front door facing Kalispell to the west. The original north-facing building was razed in 1965 to make way for the new four-lane highway.
Well into the 1960s he increased the sporting goods focus and shrank other merchandise lines. In 1954, Verne Lupton bought out his partner and continued to grow Snappy's inventory. As the years accumulated, so did their inventory of fishing tackle, hardware and other household and handyman needs. Inside the station, Engelbach and the senior Lupton kept some basic groceries and a well-stocked candy rack - making it one of the first of the area's early general store/gas stations. The triple-S moniker turned out to be an identifiable marketing tool that kept the name memorable well into the next century. In 1947, Robert Engelbach and Verne Lupton, B.J.'s dad, put in a gas pump and started a fuel-oil distributorship called Snappy ServiSenter at the corner of what is now U.S. The practice of making relationships the most important consideration in daily life and in business has shaped Snappy's as much as it's shaped Lupton.įresh off the Evergreen sporting goods store's 60th anniversary celebration, Lupton took a look back at Snappy's journey from a 1947 service station to a thriving sporting goods store in 2007. "I guess I figured that out a few years ago. "It is our absolute top priority - people first," Lupton said. Lupton, owner of Snappy Sport Senter for half its six-decade existence, learned that the strongest foundational ethics never change. Evergreen store evolved from 1947 gas stationīut B.J.
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