We’ve heard it before, shop local

Matt Pearl

We who live in small towns––tiny towns in many of our cases––need occasionally to remind ourselves of the give-and-take involved with rural living.

In the community where I make my home, King city, we have had a dreadful example lately of the importance of maintaining the habit of patronizing our local merchants. The grocery store has closed, and the logistics involved with small-volume stores is making the shop difficult for an interested owner to conduct business. In fact, the outlook on the project is truly uncertain.

Grocery suppliers have merged over the years, consolidating their home offices while maintaining the same-sized footprint that a once larger group of small-time suppliers occupied. It’s the same old story: we’ve seen it happen to farming, where a smaller pool of landowners who possess more acreage has become the norm. It happens in retail stores, of course, on a daily basis. It’s cheaper for a large volume buyer to operate from a central location, keep prices low and to decide which of our shops are too small to warrant their presence in our communities.

This is the story of King city’s grocery store. The beloved owner-operator model is being starved out by the corporate policy makers, who evidently are not adequately convinced that people having to drive a distance for groceries is a problem. Or not enough of a problem for them to supply small vendors with products, when their board room has ruled that only large suppliers in larger markets are worth their trouble.

I will take my share of the responsibility in this woeful state of things: I know I ought to shop locally 100 percent of the time when it is possible to do so, and I admittedly have not done this as well as perhaps I could have. If I ever get the next chance, I’ll do better, and so should several of us.

But 1,000 people live in King city. Hundreds more live in the immediate surrounding area, and patronize the businesses therein. I know that’s unimpressive to a suited executive from a large-scale grocery supplier, but those folks matter.

We can’t have it all, I guess. Rural Americans pay less for their houses than their urban counterparts––but they also make considerably less money. We pay a premium to have nice schools, fire departments, ambulance service––services that the cities are more capable of providing cheaply by having the advantage of larger populations.

Our health insurance premiums are far greater––as a friend pointed out to me (and I wrote about) several months ago, compare your community’s rates to a person living in Liberty or Platte City. I’ll spoil it for you in case you haven’t had the time to look it up: you’re paying about twice as much as they are.

And now we can’t even buy hamburger in our hometown. So we fill up with pricey fuel to go into pricey cars––cars that will feel the mileage increase of having to leave town for groceries––and drive on pricey highways for the privilege of putting sales tax money into another town’s economy.

In other words, King Citians will pay a premium price to help other towns grown. And their sales tax-funded services, including 911 service, will undoubtedly feel the crunch.

Change is inevitable as time passes; perhaps this is just the scripted story of small-town life in a low population area. I doubt many of us are experiencing anything different from what countless others have endured across the landscape of rural America. But that doesn’t mean any of us should like it, or accept it passively.

A community in terms of the people alone may endure simply: good neighbors are sometimes about all you need. But a community that wishes to exist as an independent economic entity requires something more: commerce. For those who have local businesses whose interests you, with your patronage, may help to protect, I encourage you to do so.

Matt Pearl owns and operates newspapers in King City, Albany, and Grant City.