On a winter morning in the Ulster County hamlet of Olivebridge, Tetta’s Market hums with the rhythm of rural life. Pickup trucks pull in for gas. A contractor grabs coffee and a breakfast sandwich. Someone else picks up milk, eggs, and a handful of items they didn’t plan to buy but need anyway. The door opens and closes steadily, marking the pulse of a place that has been serving this stretch of the Catskills for more than 70 years.
Tetta’s began in the 1950s as a country store in a former one-car-garage operation opened by Primo Stropoli’s great-grandfather, an first-generation Italian immigrant who came to the area on weekends from New York City before deciding to stay. After about a decade, he bought a wedge-shaped parcel at the intersection of County Roads 2 and 3 and built the store that still stands today. Stropoli’s grandparents took over in the early 1970s and ran it for 45 years, keeping it open until 2018.
“I grew up in the store—quite literally,” Stropoli says. “I went to college, traveled, lived in the city, lived abroad. But something about growing up in it stuck with me. I always wanted to run it. I was just waiting for the right moment.”
That moment came in 2019, when Stropoli bought the building, renovated it with his father, and reopened Tetta’s in early 2020. The renovation was extensive but careful: new equipment, energy-efficient lighting, upgraded refrigeration, and a stripped-back interior that revealed Rosendale cement floors long hidden beneath layers of laminate. The goal was to bring the store up to speed while preserving its bones.
Once the doors reopened, however, the business began to stretch beyond its traditional footprint. Stropoli expanded the deli, which had been minimal under his grandparents, and introduced breakfast for the first time. He revived a long-dormant pizza oven that had last been used briefly in 1999, when his father experimented with running a pizzeria out of the store. The equipment had sat idle for nearly two decades.
“We fired those ovens back up,” Stropoli says. “We went a lot deeper into food than I ever really expected to.”
Liquor was the next step. Tetta’s had always held a retail license to sell beer, but Stropoli secured a tavern license as well, allowing alcohol to be served on-site. That decision led to the construction of an outdoor beer garden. (Tetta’s also brews it own beer, an Italian pilsner, available in cans or on tap.)
“One thing just snowballed into the next,” he says. “We built the beer garden, then we got a stage. Suddenly we’re doing live music. We did some comedy shows in the fall. We’ve got an arm-wrestling tournament coming up on February 28.”
None of it followed a formal plan. With few gathering places nearby, the store began filling gaps by default. People didn’t just stop for gas or groceries; they lingered. Events created moments of activity during the slow winter months and reinforced Tetta’s role as a social anchor in a place with limited public infrastructure.
At the same time, those additions revealed a deeper challenge. The beer garden and events brought people through the door, but they didn’t fundamentally change how most customers used the store. Tetta’s was still a place to stop, not necessarily a place to shop.
That realization collided with broader forces reshaping Olivebridge and the surrounding area. More than 60 percent of homes in the town of Olive are now second homes. The shift accelerated during the pandemic, thinning the year-round customer base that once sustained a seven-day-a-week country store. Weekend traffic increased, but midweek volume softened. Locals cashed out and moved away, often unable to buy back into the market.
“We can’t operate like businesses that only open Thursday through Sunday,” Stropoli says. “We’re a gas station. We have to be open every day. When you’re the only place for 20 or 25 minutes in every direction, you end up filling a lot of voids.”
Those pressures intensified in the past two years. Inflation drove up the cost of goods in 2023. In 2024, operating overhead jumped by as much as 30 to 40 percent. Margins tightened. The room for error shrank.
“That’s when it became clear that what we were offering wasn’t fully meeting the needs of the community anymore,” Stropoli says.
A New Partner
In the beginning of this year, he brought on a new business partner, Joe Trad, in what he describes as a necessary step to keep the business viable through its hardest season. Trad comes from his own family-business background, growing up in St. Louis in a Lebanese immigrant family and later working in agriculture abroad and food manufacturing and restaurants in New York City.
“What we kept coming back to was the question of what Tetta’s needs to be right now,” Trad says. “The definition of ‘local’ has changed. It’s become a mix of people who have been here for decades and people who are here part-time but still rely on this place.”
For Trad, the pivot isn’t about choosing one audience over another. It’s about serving both without pricing either out. That has meant rethinking distribution, renegotiating vendor relationships, and rebuilding the store’s inventory from the ground up.
“If people have to wait until the weekend and drive to Walmart because milk and crackers are too expensive here, we’ve lost them,” Trad says. “Our approach is volume over margin. Sell more items at competitive prices instead of fewer items at a premium.”
The shift underway is substantial. Convenience-store stock is being replaced with a fuller grocery selection. Staples sit alongside higher-end options. Conventional products share shelf space with organic ones. A pet section stocks the items people actually need, from birdseed to basic feed. Plans are in motion to expand prepared foods at the deli counter—classic, practical meals meant to cover a family dinner without a special trip elsewhere.
“We want someone to say, ‘Don’t go into town—we can get that at Tetta’s,’” Trad says. “Success looks like Moms shopping at Tetta’s for their household needs.”
It’s a return, in many ways, to an older model. In the 1970s and ’80s, Stropoli recalls, his grandparents sold everything from chainsaws to boots. The scale is different now, but the impulse is the same. When redundancy disappears from a rural economy, one business ends up carrying a lot of weight.
Unlike seasonal retail or destination dining, Tetta’s can’t pull back during the winter. It opens early for plow drivers on snow days. It stays open through the slow months because people depend on it. “There’s a lot that happens here that people don’t notice,” Trad says. “You’re fueling the neighborhood, literally and otherwise.”
The pivot is still in its early stages. Shelves are being reset. Menus tested. Supply chains reworked. Whether it succeeds will depend on forces far beyond the store’s doors. For now, the lights are on, the coffee is hot, and the door keeps opening—small but persistent signs of resilience at a crossroads that has been serving its community for generations.
