For those of you who have never heard of it, IGA is the Independent Grocers Alliance, a sort of franchising model among grocery stores and supermarkets in contrast to a chain of them. They’re independently owned but also work together. As with fast food franchises and the like, though, someone with a successful IGA store here may also start an IGA store over there.
The IGA in Summit closed earlier this year, after being in business for some 20+ years. Nearly everyone is attributing this to something that they already opposed. One faction blames Walmart, which opened up right down the street. Another faction is blaming unions, as IGA ran a union shop. The people who owned the IGA are actually busy working on getting a new location opened up in Callie.
Here in Callie, we have two supermarkets, a dinky little IGA downtown, and a large Safeway on the side of town. I uniformly shop at the latter. Partly because it’s closer. We live on the same side of town. Also, it’s less expensive. Also, it keeps better hours. Also, it’s more convenient. This is rather a common theme. Don’t like big box stores? Try living in a place without them. It’s uncertain to me how IGA stays in business, aside from community loyalty and being slightly on the west of down. I’m not sure if that’s going to be enough to keep Chain IGA from driving Dinky Little IGA out of business. Two large and convenient locations on each side of down, and LDIGA sandwiched in between.
I believe the ultimate answer to why IGA is leaving Summit has little to do with Walmart, per se, or unions. To the extent that CIGA’s leadership has commented, they said that Summit’s supermarket market is oversaturated. There are six large supermarkets and that appears to be one too many. It was profitable, but not profitable enough. And not as profitable as the new location in Callie should be.
I don’t fully understand why this community needs a second store. Then again, we also something on the order of five auto part places, several garages, and broadly more choices than I would expect to exist in a community of a few thousand. That’s been one of the surprises of ruralia, to be honest. When debating whether or not a pharmacist should be able to refuse to fill a prescription for birth control, the spectre of “the town where there is only one pharmacy” comes to mind. But if towns of only a few thousand have three pharmacies, how many towns of a single pharmacy exist? How many are in places that people aren’t used to regular trips to a larger town.
It’s been an interesting experience, living in a place smaller than I had ever intended. The commercial options are certainly more limited, but a lot less limited than I would have guessed. I guess I had sort of envisioned a Mayberry, where there was the grocier, the pharmacist, the mechanic, and so on. The number of things that come in ones are quite few. Even large supermarkets, apparently.
McVeytown.
Clinton.
Saxton.
This is mostly off the top of my head. PA has a lot of small towns (some gov’t mandated, can’t get bigger).
To me, it’s not the “isn’t used to getting to a bigger town” — it’s the “can’t get a ride” problem that most teens know about.
Couple that with living in a shtetl… and you might see where there could be a problem.
McVeytown is the most remote and has no pharmacies at all. It also has a population of about 400. Go 10-15 miles down the road in either direction and you have options.
Clinton (pop <500) has no pharmacies, but has four within five miles and several more if you expand to 10 or 15.
Saxton has two, then a couple more if you look within 10-15 miles.
So… still no place with a single town pharmacy. Either places with more than one, or places with none. That’s what I was driving at. The places with none seem largely to me to be places where you are going to get used to going to town for this and that.
I work in a town with an IGA and a Safeway, almost identical to what you describe. There are four pharmacies. I live in a town void of both grocery stores and pharmacies. We have a gas station though!
And a bar? Or three?
Four bars! All within a block of each other. And a bank and a credit union, the easier to drink your money away.
Heh, my small home town (pop. 1300) has three bars, two immediately adjacent to each other, and one half a block away.
What is the relation between McVeytown and OyVeytown?
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
surprising that Clinton has no pharmacies. I suppose the college has one?
If your experience is like mine was a few years ago in rural Tennessee, you’ll find yourself out of salami for lunch, and driving 45 minutes to the Wal-Mart because the cost of a pack of deli meat at the nearby market feels extortionate compared to the cost of the same product in town — and you don’t pay attention to the cost of gas or your time when doing it because you’re saving like, a buck fifty on that salami.
*snort* WV folks seem a bit smarter. They come up and buy from Costco. About four times a year. Haul back 100’s of pounds of flour, sugar, whatnot (some of the sugar’s for stills, of course). Freeze what they don’t need immediately.
Until just a few years ago, my town (pop. ~4 or 5k) had only one pharmacy. Then the local discount chain (Pamida; think mutant baby cousin of Walmart) added an in-store pharmacy.
Around here all the counties are exactly thirty miles to a side (a consequence of Homestead Act settlement) and the only decent sized towns are the county seats smack dab in the middle of each one. So the next anything is likely a thirty mile drive either north, south, east, or west. Usually all four. Although we do have two grocery stores, but they’re less than a block from each other. Go figure.
Fair enough. It’s just something I’ve never really seen. Ideally, to the extent that we allow pharmacies to pass on certain prescriptions, we’d allow for greater access through alternative means (you have to show up for the first fill, but refills can be mailed – which may actually be the case now…).
we do have two grocery stores, but they’re less than a block from each other. Go figure.
Hotelling’s law (illustrated with pharmacies, no less!)
How much of this do you think exists because that is simply what people in the community know how to do? In short, your small town has four mechanics or so because they all got local training and never left?
There is an old joke about how a town with one lawyer will have a lawyer who starves to death and a town with two lawyers will have them both do very nicely. Maybe this applies to pharmacies and mechanics as well.
As for big box stores, don’t people who live in large cities often do without big box stores? There is one IKEA in Brooklyn and it is quite a hike to get to. One of the oddest things about moving from New York to San Francisco has been seeing more supermarkets. NY has some but with a few exceptions they are not super-big. The exceptions being the Whole Foods in Union Square, Fairway, and some others. San Francisco has proper super-markets. The kind that I usually associate with the suburbs and just as large. They also have the world’s smallest Whole Foods.
Fair enough. Some places may have so much stuff that they don’t need the box stores. Back when I lived in the city, I typically went to Walmart for one reason and one reason only: I needed something really late at night. Most of the rest of the time, I had access to other places. It was really nice being able to buy rope at 3 in the morning, though, lemme tell you. Then I moved to a small city, and Walmart was a godsend.
It was really nice being able to buy rope at 3 in the morning, though, lemme tell you.
Yeah, I had a girlfriend into that sort of stuff too…
Good memories for when you’re on the road, eh?
I hear this. Not long after moving to our town we had a hailstorm that broke our skylight and we had water pouring in and down our walls (in a manufactured home, that’s a really bad thing, since damn near everything is made of press board). The only place open after midnight was Wal Mart. I knew I was supposed to hate them, but where the hell else was I going to buy a ladder, tarp and rope before my home melted? And at a price I could afford/
you’re supposed to have such things lying around…. 😉
just like a pipe wrench, a soldering iron, and a good vacuum.
Almost went there. Thank you for doing it for me, Rod.
We have a little planned community right next to us and they opened a little mom & pop grocery store recently. Quality items but ridiculous prices ($7 for a pound of bacon). We want to see them succeed but we’re not making 6-figure salaries. They just can’t compete with the buying power of chain stores.
IGA is a good compromise. It allows all those little independent stores to leverage their combined resources and lower the cost of goods. Whenever I am out in the state I do my best to give them my money.