OSAWATOMIE, Kan. -- A slight echo carries the sound of footfalls through the aisles of what used to be Moon's grocery store.
Some dry goods remain on the shelves, but most are bare. The coolers stand empty. There are no cars in the parking lot.
The last grocery store, the final place with a produce section for a city of 4,000, is no more, and may never be again.
"We're an endangered species," said Mike Moon, who ran the store for a quarter-century. "It's a scary situation."
The troubles of running a small-town shop grew more dire when the Wal-Mart store 7 miles away in Paola grew to include a full-blown grocery. Moon tried some things in response. Then he sold the business, while keeping the building, to someone else who spiffed things up even more. It didn't make a difference.
It's a story repeated in small towns across Kansas and rural America. Grocery stores struggle to survive, even when there's not a Wal-Mart nearby.
Groceries have a long history in small towns, but like the small farms that once dotted the country's hinterlands, they've become fewer and larger. That consolidation doomed the mom-and-pop groceries the way it did the 300-acre grain farm and the small-herd livestock operation.
The disappearance of the grocery store -- more than an inconvenience to the elderly, the poor and those who don't drive -- speeds the plummet of home values and any other lingering retail activity.
A PRIME EXAMPLE
Kansas is a prime example of what's happening elsewhere. From 2006-10, according to a report on "The Rural Grocery Crisis," a fifth of the state's rural groceries shut down. The Center for Engagement and Community Development at Kansas State University recorded the loss of 43 of the 213 rural groceries since it started tracking them in 2007.
In Iowa, any town with less than 1,000 people is more likely than not to have lost its only grocery store since the mid-1990s.
Two out of every five Kansas counties include a food desert, an area that's at least 10 miles from the nearest grocery.
Even the prospect that the local grocery might close is enough to make the most vulnerable residents worry about putting together a week of meals.
In Moran, Kan., a town of about 500 people in the southeast part of the state, 67-year-old Jessie Bables need only walk across the street from her rent-subsidized apartment to get eggs, milk, toilet paper and the special of the week at Stub's Market.
But a for-sale sign outside the store, and all that it represents, has her worried. The next-closest grocery is in Iola 13 miles away. That would mean Bables would have to time her grocery shopping around the schedule for the bus that comes every other Friday or pay someone to drive her to the store and back.
"I have to pinch my pennies," she said. "I can't afford to pay somebody to drive, because that's money I wouldn't have for groceries."
Stub's Market isn't planning to close. Yet.
Owners Shirlene and David Mahurin would like to ease into semi-retirement in the next few years. She's 61, and he's 68. They've had the place up for sale on and off for about five years. Although there's been some interest in it, no one with the wherewithal has emerged. Banks are more than skeptical about financing grocery stores in small towns.
It's a small-margin business, typically between 2 percent and 3 percent of sales. The trick is volume. That's great in a suburban neighborhood that can draw the business of thousands, or tens of thousands, of customers.
In a place like Moran, not so much. So when the Mahurins negotiate deals with the distributors that supply their inventory, they are at a distinct disadvantage.
"The less you have delivered, the more it costs," said Shirlene Mahurin, who includes butchering among her chores at Stub's Market. "It makes it really hard to keep things going."
At some point, still a few years off, she said, the couple will walk away from the store. But they hope to sell it -- both to recoup the money and sweat equity they poured into the business, and so people like Bables won't be stranded without a grocery.
GOING CO-OP
So a fledgling effort is underway to make the grocery store a cooperative, likely the first to emerge in Kansas since the 1970s. A nonprofit group, Thrive Allen County, that works on health and economic development issues is searching for grants and low-interest loans to drum up purchase money. The Mahurins have listed the store for $148,000.
Organizers have recruited a few dozen people to buy $100 memberships to the co-op. Anyone would still be able to shop at the store, but the hope is that people who've invested in the next iteration of Stub's would be more committed to the store and its role in keeping Moran alive.
Larry Manes is part of the drive, and he's looking for other "angel investors" to follow his lead in putting up loans of $10,000 each. That money would be less a promising financial investment, he said, than something bordering on the philanthropic.
"It's about preserving the community," he said. "If that store goes, in 10 years we'll have a population of 100" -- a loss of 80 percent of the people living in Moran.
The co-op effort reflects how small-town groceries increasingly can't expect to stay open merely on market economics, said Ben Alexander, the deputy director of Thrive Allen County.
"The reality is that any project like this is going to need some help," he said.
About 13 miles west on U.S. 54, a G&W Foods store is under construction on the site of a former hospital. It's being built with help from the county government to provide a stand-alone grocery store as an alternative to the Wal-Mart that opened on the outskirts of Iola in 2007 -- and ultimately sped the folding of other groceries in town.
Those efforts to prop up remote grocery stores can mean the difference between a small town thriving or withering, said David Procter, the director of the Center for Engagement and Community Development at Kansas State University.
"If there's no grocery store, then the property value goes down. Then the schools struggle because businesses struggle, and you can't keep commerce in town," he said. "The grocery store is a barometer, and it's an attractor of citizens. If you don't have one, things go downhill."
Already, he said, rural areas have higher obesity rates -- along with the medical problems that follow -- than urban areas. Lose the grocery, and Procter said folks will turn to gas station convenience stores and similar merchants. Not only are the prices higher, but a selection of oranges and bananas gets replaced by Fruit Roll-Ups and Bomb Pops.
Pass through Greeley, Kan. -- fewer than 300 people left -- and folks in the bank aren't sure if the grocery closed in the late 1970s or early '80s. It's about a 15-minute drive each way to Garnett for groceries. In Blue Mound, Bradley's closed more recently, leaving folks there with a similar trip to stock their kitchens.
In traveling to every town in Kansas, first in the early 2000s and again in the first part of this decade, Marci Penner noted the disappearance of small grocery stores and the void they left.
"If your town wants to sustain itself, access to groceries is key," said Penner, the director of the Kansas Sampler Foundation that promotes rural culture. "People have to either accept the lack of one, which can be really hard, or they move."
Increasingly, city councils and county boards step in with various forms of help -- providing tax abatements or low-interest loans, or setting up nonprofit operations.
In northeast Kansas, Muscotah, population 125, had only a bait shop and a post office when C.J. Hanson started selling a few grocery items and crafts out of a home. The town saw a possibility, and she got $55,000 in "flat-out" donations that, with the help of some loans, allowed her to build a small metal building.
Now she's selling groceries, and serving lunches and dinners.
"I'm not here to make a million," she said. "I just want a place for people to gather where they can get some food."
SundayMonday Business on 08/20/2017