DUNVILLA, Minn. — For years, Lakeland General Store in Dunvilla never offered drive thru services. Despite this, owner Bob Shemp said some people are not getting the message.
"I was in the back talking to a customer and all of a sudden I heard a loud bang," Schempp recalled. "I didn't know what happened. . . . I come running up to the front of the store, and then of course I saw product and shelving laying all over the floor, and you could see just a little tiny bit of a vehicle inside of the store."
A white pickup truck plowed through one of the store's walls Sunday, Aug. 2. Schempp learned the driver left his truck in drive while parked outside.
"Then his grandson was sitting in the passenger seat, the way I understood it, and then he reached for the break and hit the gas," Schempp described. "Yeah, just kinda went right through the side of the building."
Fortunately, no one was hurt and the store is still open for business. Schempp's sense of humor did not fade away, either.
ADVERTISEMENT
He boarded up the wall with a spray painted message which reads: "Not a Drive Thru."
"I don't know; it just came to me so I threw it up there," Schempp said with a laugh.
This is not the first time the general store has fallen victim to an unfortunate driving accident. About one month ago, someone drove into Schempp's gas pumps, taking some of them off.
"... came out of our ditch at full speed, launched probably 80 feet through the air, landed on his drivers side of his Yukon XL and then rolled right through our gas pumps," Schempp said. "There's some underground issues, they have to do some concrete work, and then like everything else with COVID, it's difficult to get products, so we're probably not going to have those up and running until late September."
Schempp has never had anything like this happen at his store. Now it has happened twice within a month.
"Funny thing is, when it happened I was like, 'oh, now what?'" he said.
Schempp is considering a guardrail for his store to keep things like this from happening again.
