We’ve all been there. You get home late and open the fridge to start making dinner and find somebody finished the milk and didn’t put it on the list. Or the eggs. Or something you could run down pick up at the corner grocery in the city.
But you don’t live in the city.
You’re out on the farm, or in a small town where the gas station went card-reader only years ago.
Food deserts are a real thing. USDA figures approximately 20% of rural America fall within these areas. Roughly 2.3 million people live in low-income rural areas more than 10 miles from a supermarket.
Our usual job in community and economic development is creating the conditions for entrepreneurs to create jobs bringing home outside income. But if the people working in those jobs have to drive an hour or more to get groceries, you’re missing some essential community-serving infrastructure. The simple problem is when people working in those industries have to leave town to shop, their money leaves town again with them.
A Community Comes Together
This week, Nebraska Public Media went back to visit the small town of Cody, population about 170, deep in the Nebraska Sandhills. A dozen years ago, residents, educators, and local partners created Circle C Market, a nonprofit grocery store connected to the Cody-Kilgore school district.
Students work at the store through school-based learning and paid shifts. They gain experience in inventory, receiving, stocking, ordering, food preparation, customer service, money handling, merchandising, and management. You know—employable skills.
The community gains access to a local source of food and a community anchor. The enterprises’ value is not limited to the number of jobs or annual profit margins, because as NPM reports those are slim. The value is practical support of the community, by the community.
Others in larger places have tried similar project to address their particular needs. I came across the example of the Linda Tutt High School in Sanger, Texas, in the north ex-urbs of Dallas-Fort Worth. As NPR for North Texas reported, the on-campus grocery store, which began in 2019, includes online curriculum and counseling, as well as a local source of food.
Plugging the leaks in local retail should not be your first economic development strategy. But it can be a compliment. Essential retail services are an enabling condition setting the stage for other new businesses. The goal is not complete local self-sufficiency. The objective is to reduce avoidable leakage from routine purchases that can be reasonably supplied locally.
Axtell, Kansas, population 400, is another community where residents banded together to fund, build, and operate a full-service grocery store to ensure easy access to food in a brand new building. They used a funding and management model that fit their community.
If this sounds like an idea your small town or rural county might want to pursue, the Center for Rural Affairs may be a useful policy source to learn more. They have a whole Food Systems section online at https://www.cfra.org/food-systems with resources on farmers markets, rural groceries, and a local food project for southwest Iowa.
