The Food Desert. Disappearing Grocery Stores.

From this morning's Tribune comes a human interest story that directly relates to the focus of this blog:

In Midwest, there are three local choices for food: a gas station, a church food bank and a bench outside of the post office.

There was a grocery store, off of state Highway 387. It closed either five or 10 years ago, depending on whom you believe at the Arcade Bar, a watering hole in nearby Edgerton. In either case, the store is locked and boarded up now. The driveway is overgrown, and a row of storage lockers sits in the field behind it. Were it not for the bartender pointing the store out, visitors would drive by, completely unaware that at one point, there was fresh food for sale in this small community.

Kaycee’s general store is 30 miles away. Casper and its handful of grocery stores is more than 40 miles to the south. But the Big D, the gas station, is in town. It has milk, cartons of eggs, pre-packaged cold cuts and frozen hamburgers. There are no fresh vegetables. The restaurant in the gas station has fried chicken meals that top 2,000 calories.

“There are people in need here,” Donna Miller said from her community garden in Midwest last week. She explained that the older residents give grocery lists to the younger people who drive into Casper.

We've dealt with this before, but  this story does document a real change, as well as a real burden for people living in small Wyoming towns, and I'd wager small towns all over.

First on the closure, I recall that store and I recall stopping in there, but I couldn't tell you how long ago now it was either.  The older you get, the more recently it seems things like that occurred.  It feels like five years to me, but I'll bet its ten.

Anyhow, back to the story, all the little towns have this struggle, pretty much.  The situation in Midwest and Edgerton is noted in the story.  Expanding out just a little bit, in this county in the other small towns there aren't any real grocery stores in any of them.  Powder River had a gas station that carried some items, and a bar that sold package liquor (all bars can sell package liquor) but they both closed about a decade or so ago.  Out at Clarks Corner there used to be a crossroads gas station that sold some convenience items (and which had a bar and sold liquor) before that locality started to be developed into a rural subdivision which became a sort of town, but it's closed.  Alcova has a small store that sells convenience items (and beer) and does quite a business with fishermen, but it's not a full grocery store by any means.  The two nearby reservoirs that are heavily used have marinas that sell convenience items (I've never been in either, so I can't answer the beer question).  Waltman and HIland both have stores, although the Waltman one was closed for quite some time and may have just reopened for hunting season last year, I'm not sure.  Neither are full stores, although Hiland has a restaurant as well, as Waltman once did, associated with their small stores.  You can buy gasoline at Waltman and Alcova.  Glenrock, over the county line, does have a small grocery store.

Now, if you wanted fresh meat, let's say, or fresh vegetables, in most of these areas you are going to have to drive to a distant town. Sometimes very distant.

And we could go on and on.  Shoshoni, for example, doesn't have  grocery store.  People there must drive to Riverton.

This phenomenon is sometimes call a Food Desert, and before its misunderstood, it also applies to lots of urban areas, particularly poorer ones. And it reflects the consolidation of grocery stores.

Consider this again.  Casper at one time had the Grant Street Grocery, Braddis Grocery, Elk Street Grocery, and some small grocery store down on Ash Street whose name I don't recall.  My father sometimes patronized Braddis', which was the largest of the ones noted above, and when I was a kid a neighboring family often sent their children, whom I was friends with, down to the one on Ash Street whose name I can't recall.  Braddis' store was downtown and delivered.

And those are the stores I can remember.  There may have been more small local groceries I don't.  I do recall that in addition to Safeway and Albertson's, the big national grocery store chains, we also had an Ideal (which also goes by some other name I can't recall).

Of all of these, only Grant Street and Braddis' remain, and they have changed in order to stay in business. Grant Street is a specialty grocery store, although if you lived nearby you could walk there and get meat, bread and milk if you had the need.  Braddis' is a butcher shop, their meat counter always having been legendary.

Even the story of the big grocery stores has changed.  Safeway was purchased by Riddley's in Casper and now the same entity owns both the Albertson's stores and the former Safeway stores. They have to compete with Walmart, the giant retail entity, that sells groceries.  K-Mart, which I never go into, does as well, I think.  Smiths has a huge grocery store here and is also a chain, with their store located in what was once a Gibson's.  The two Buttrey's, however, bit the dust.  And there's a Natural Grocers, which specializes in what it sounds like.  Mills and Casper both have Family Dollar stores which do sell groceries.  Evansville and Bar Nunn, which adjoin Casper like Mills, don't have any grocery stores, but its a short drive into Casper for their residents.

So, if you are in Casper, there are plenty of full grocery stores around to choose from, but you are almost certainly going to have to go to one of the big chain ones unless you make an absolutely dedicated effort not to, and you likely also have a really substantial garden (which this year I did not).  If you are in a small town which does not immediately border a big one. . . you are driving to a large one, and that means you are putting in no less than thirty miles, one way.

And if you aspire to be a small town retailer of the type that was once known as a "Grocer" or a "Green Grocer", you have an uphill battle, to say the least.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Related Threads:

Food: Seasonal, local, and from the grocery store. A revolution we don't often recognize.

The Corner Store. . . .isn't there.

Not that local. Dairies

First modern grocery store opens in Memphis, Tennessee. September 6, 1916.

Foodies, locovores, fishing poles and sychronicity