Small Town’s Residents Buy Grocery Store

The elementary and high schools are long gone. So is the bank. And within the last year, an insurance company and a restaurant closed.

But the people of McCracken, population 200, were not about to let their grocery store vanish too. After all, without Fred’s Market, the nearest loaf of bread or gallon of milk would be 17 miles away.

So the folks took up a collection and bought the store themselves.

They raised about $42,000 from 80 sources, most of them people from in and around McCracken who received stock in the newly created McCracken Grocery Inc. and could get a share of any profits the store makes.

Betty Fear and her husband bought 10 shares for $500. “We may never see that $500 or any profit from it, but it was worth risking that to keep our grocery store,” she said.

Small towns that can’t offer businesses a large customer base or a generous tax break are drawing instead on community spirit.

In Gove, 60 miles northwest of McCracken, people in the town of 100 formed a nonprofit organization to buy the town’s grocery and cafe, raising the money through carnivals, suppers, bingo and raffles.

About five years ago, 34 stockholders in the rural Texas community of Warda bought the town’s only remaining business--a building with a restaurant, grocery store and post office. The restaurant, open Thursdays, Fridays and Saturday nights, serves up catfish, chicken and steak and has become a popular gathering spot, if not much of a moneymaker. Community owners take turns staffing it, with the men doing most of the cooking and the women waiting on tables.

McCracken, about 150 miles northwest of Wichita, is made up mostly of retirees, farmers and people who work in Hays or LaCrosse. Its largest single source of income is probably Social Security.

Fred and Mary Ann Taylor had operated Fred’s Market since 1963. When they decided to retire last year--he’s 68, she’s 64--they put the store up for sale. They got lots of calls, but most out-of-towners lost interest when they realized just how small McCracken is. And there was no one in McCracken who had the money or the desire to buy the store alone.

Soon the shelves began running out of food as the couple resigned themselves to closing the store, which has seven aisles, wood floors and a high, ornate metal ceiling.

But with McCracken already reduced to little more than a liquor store, beauty shop, gas station, cafe and grain elevator, the people weren’t going to let Fred’s Market become another empty storefront. On March 1, volunteers helped paint, clean and restock the place. Joel Riechel, a Bison man who invested $10,000, is managing the new grocery with his family.

Lucy Vogle, an elderly resident who has bought her groceries at Fred’s for 38 years, said she was glad to see it saved. “Good lands, yes,” she said. “I couldn’t drive out of town twice a week.”

The whole project has tied the community together, Betty Fear said. “The first time I walked in there . . . it was such an enormous feeling of pride to me that I was part of it. . . . It’s a boost to our morale in the dead of winter. It’s like spring came early to McCracken.”