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Grocery Stores closing really is happening, and really is a problem. And it's part of what's killing towns - if only because attracting new folk without one is

• genieyclo 7y ago
  Out of curiosity: why did you choose to live in such a remote/rural place?
  • stevehawk 7y ago
    As a nerd who also married a doctor and went rural - 1) Doctors tend to make more money in rural areas. Hospitals/practices tend to offer higher salaries/bonuses/etc in order to draw talent. My wife makes roughly 50% more in an area of 30,000 people (mind you, we're talking a pretty large geographic area) than she would in Miami. 2) Money goes further. My 4500sq ft home on 1.2 acres of land is worth considerably less than my previous 1700sq ft townhome on .1 acre of land back in northern Virginia near DC. personal opinion: 3) Some of us just don't want to live in a city. A weekend trip to a city a couple of times a year is enough for me.
    • hockeybias 7y ago
      I'm told nature is beautiful.
    • Aperocky 7y ago
      Glad it worked out for you, currently still stuck (near) a city. But at least it's an hour from downtown and parking a truck is not a problem at all. I wouldn't mind at all to live in the remotest of nature, as long as there is internet. My SO would probably be bored shitless.
    • repiret 7y ago
      As yet another nerd married to a doc in a rural area (Hines, OR, 90 min south of GP's John Day, and similarly remote), I'll also point out that rural docs have a broader scope of practice - to some extend they make more money because they do some work that is done by specialists in urban and suburban areas.
  • nmcfarl 7y ago
    stevehawk's reasons are not far off. I'd add that my wife really loves the scope of practice - she does literally everything from delivering babies (w/an occasional C-section) to gerontology, from addiction medicine to ER. This just doesn't happen elsewhere. And we like the space. The road we live on ends in a wilderness area, the hiking and X-C skiing and so on is amazing. And both us and our 6 year old love having sheep and alpacas and a dozen chickens and a greenhouse. Hobby farming like this just doesn't work in Seattle. We miss live shows and restaurants and all the city stuff, but for now at least we like this more.
    • genieyclo 7y ago
      Thank you both for your answers!
    • PopeDotNinja 7y ago
      I just looked at the dining options in John Day, OR. I see a pizza place, a Subway, and a Dairy Queen. That covers my needs :)
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • eaandkw 7y ago
    It seems a lot of people “suffer” from the problem of wanting to live in a nice rural area without a lot of people or hassles but then want most of the same amenities of large cities. And by working remotely and exploiting the situation it never occurs to them to open up their own business/ grocery store. I’m sure other people that live in those areas would love to have a well stocked grocery store as well.
    • CalRobert 7y ago
      It occurs to us, but doing tech work remote is much more lucrative and reliable. Also, are you sure people want it? If so why do these stores close?
      • techsupporter 7y ago
        > If so why do these stores close? Because for every one or two fantastically wealthy-beyond-all-belief-for-the-area technologist who moves in, five people who don't have a job like that leave the region in search of something that pays an income. A lot of these bucolic rural areas with a few thousand people in a county exist because of an industry that was present decades ago that has now collapsed. So, sure, the property is cheap and the town is relatively uncomplicated...but people who don't make six figures (and, thus, can pretty much choose to live wherever we want) are leaving because the opportunities are gone. One or two tech-paycheck-family households can't sustain a set of businesses that had 7,000 potential customers before. I've watched this happen with where my parents grew up and in my grandparents' hometowns before them. Everyone I know in Seattle who isn't in tech didn't move to Seattle to get a tech job; they moved from Idaho and Utah and eastern Oregon and eastern Washington to find work because their sub-10,000-person towns are (in some cases literally) drying up and blowing away yet, even here, they're being pushed out because of salaries. Yes, I'm leading into wealth inequality and it having gotten so bad that people are squeezed on the starting end because the towns where they grew up are collapsing and squeezed on the destination end because trying to live where the jobs are increasingly doesn't result in the level of income required to actually live there. But those of us in tech can simply decamp to our 5,000sqft houses on three acres of land and pull in Silicon Valley wages in a Montana property market and feel quite clever. I don't blame the individual who makes this decision but it still seems quite perverse.
  • briffle 7y ago
    John Day and the area around it are gorgeous. For the price of a nice home in Portland, you can have a home and acreage. Room to garden, enjoy the outdoors, and nice people. I visit there every spring, and think about it. Then I see how horrible 4g coverage is with the hills and valleys, and how slow most of the wisp are... Starlink might really change things for rural internet
• gnopgnip 7y ago
  I grew up in Westport WA and it was similar in some ways, next closest town with a grocery store is ~40 mins away. The local grocery store closed down for nearly a year before reopening with new ownership. You really appreciate what you used to have
• bsder 7y ago
  > Grocery Stores closing really is happening, and really is a problem. And it's part of what's killing towns No, it's a symptom. The real problem is "the town should shut down". This is the standard "people are gung-ho about capitalism when things are going up, and angry about it when things are going down." There is a lower limit past when a town no longer makes sense from a self-sufficiency standpoint. If people in small town genuinely want to change that calculus, then they need to start talking about Universal Healthcare and Universal Basic Income. Unfortunately, those are the kind of solutions which small town people tend to oppose.
  • magduf 7y ago
    Universal healthcare and UBI aren't going to magically make a town economically viable. It'll just result in other places subsidizing some people to live in that place and sit on their asses mostly. It might work out if lots of such people congregate in one place, which will turn it back into an economically viable location, with people starting businesses (since UBI does help entrepreneurialism after all), but if it's just some little village, it'll just be some people doing little to nothing for extra money and complaining that there's no grocery stores there, because even with 100 people with UBI, that's still not enough to sustain a business. Many of these towns just need to shut down and become ghost towns. Whatever industry that used to sustain them decades ago is gone now, so they have no more reason to exist. This isn't new: the Western US states are full of actual "ghost towns" from the late 1800s and early 1900s, most of which died out because the nearby mine got tapped out and shut down. The towns died, and the people actually (unlike these days) accepted reality, and packed up and moved out. All that's left now is usually building foundations, though some places have some collapsed buildings left. Conservative small-town people in the US these days are really a strange lot. They whine about "socialism", but then they complain about their little town dying out, but refuse to do anything to improve their situation such as moving to a city for work, and then seem to want a government handout. I'll also add that universal healthcare isn't going to magically bring hospitals to rural areas. Lots of rural people are so far away from medical facilities that they're basically screwed if they have any problems that require help quickly. Hospitals require a lot of money, and a lot of highly-trained staff; universal healthcare isn't going to make all these people suddenly want to relocate to some small town.
• nexuist 7y ago
  > Not having to commute hours for groceries is a big deal, as is being able to get vegetables of season - and in the rural west these things not a given. What you are describing is a de facto food desert: https://www.cdc.gov/features/FoodDeserts/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/features/FoodDeserts/index.html There might be an easy (albeit costly) way to fix this. Just today I learned about a govt agency called the Essential Air Service: > The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) subsidizes airlines to serve communities across the country that otherwise would not receive scheduled air service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service Because seats are paid for in advance, airlines don't have to worry about route popularity, and that allows them to financially justify serving towns that otherwise would never be considered by any airline. I wonder if taking the same model and applying it to food a la the Essential Food Service might make sense. If federal or state governments subsidized every grocery store purchase so the owners can afford to keep the lights on, we can stop or even reverse the grocery store death toll and enable shorter commutes for rural residents.
  • bgorman 7y ago
    Why should we be subsidizing rural communities with free services that are terrible for the environment? If people want the benefits of modern civilization like air travel and grocery stores, they should move to cities. We are doing enough harm to the world in cities, we don't need to encourage sprawl even more.
    • const_throwaway 7y ago
      Now do gentrification.
    • elihu 7y ago
      We need to have at least some people living in small towns and sparsely populated areas to produce food and manage natural resources that cities depend on.
      • lotsofpulp 7y ago
• graycat 7y ago
  Maybe form a local consumer's coop: Say, once a week, say, Saturday, refrigerated truck makes the run to one or a few good local grocery stores. The truck takes with it specific orders. Or for some grocery stores, they have Web sites where can order items ready for pickup. Actually, have the truck start in the city, get the grocery lists or pick-up orders via e-mail, get the groceries, drive to the small town, off load everything, and return empty. For the off-load, maybe the small town has an old building with some refrigeration that can store fresh/frozen foods for, say, 24 hours. For the truck, maybe just find someone in the town just to DO this service -- they rent a truck for, say, six hours, pickup the groceries, drive the two hours, and then return. If once a week has the trucking cost be too high compared with the grocery costs, then make the deal each two weeks: Most fresh foods will keep a week, maybe two. Frozen foods can keep months. Good way for everyone in the town to meet!