A-D-K Action recently released the Rural Grocery Report which assesses the challenges, strengths and the role of about 30 small independent groceries as community anchors in the Adirondacks. It does not include convenience stores, chains or gas stations.
Project Manager Courtney Meisenheimer tells North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley that the report is an extension of one of the group‘s key issues: food security.
Courtney Meisenheimer: This is really a product of many years of working in the food sector, working in the space of farmers and the growing of the food and then also working in the space of getting food to people and then recognizing like, hey, there's an important piece of this puzzle here that we haven't really looked into, which is that distribution point at our local independently owned grocery stores. And so I think that that prompted us to ask the question: What kind of support exists for people who own our small rural grocery stores?
So we're talking about not like Tops or Market 32, but those mom and pop, those generational-level stores that are so important in the community because they give us a sense of place. They're not just places where people buy food. They're community gathering spots. They provide cooked meals. There's so much more. And so, we wanted to create a report that told their stories and tried to reveal just some of the nuances of the challenges that our rural grocery store owners face living in the Park.
We also wanted to test this idea of if we listen to rural grocery store owners and ask them what they need and we were able to provide micro grants to help them address a challenge in their business, what kind of effect would that have and what would the kinds of things be that they would purchase? And so, alongside this report where we did a lot of listening and learning with store owners across the Park, we also piloted this micro grocery pilot. We wanted to share our findings, specifically with folks who work in the economic development sector, who work in organizations that are funders, foundations, people who work in recreation and tourism, because it's all interconnected. And how do we, as institutional supports, keep these really important community businesses going? How do we keep them sustained?
Bradley: Courtney, what does the report find are the key challenges?
Courtney Meisenheimer: Everyone we talked to probably highlighted a different challenge and one that was unique to their own experience. But I think thematically, a lot of things that might not necessarily be surprising: the seasonality of our area, where there's a lot of folks who own second homes and summers and the shoulder seasons maybe can bring a lot of business, but during the winter months there's not as much traffic.
A lot of themes around challenges with distribution and the cost of having to work with a smaller network of distributors who aren't making deliveries as frequently or the amount of money required to make purchases to have those deliveries happen. Those thresholds are high and it makes it hard for stores to keep things in stock. It makes it hard for them to price what's in stock competitively, things like staffing and even just burnout. There's a lot of different themes around that that rural grocery owners face.
Then you just layer on top of that right now our changing economic world and we know it's just harder to purchase things. And people have different buying habits now where maybe they're purchasing things online or they're traveling to a bigger city and they're kind of bulk batching their purchases, where they might hit a couple bigger box stores to get what they need, and that sometimes just kind of leaves these smaller independent stores out.
But to put a positive note on it too, what's incredible and what brings everyone back on the same page is the resiliency and the ingenuity and the creativity that these businesses and these people use to keep their storefronts open.
Bradley: Courtney, I know that this report really focuses on rural groceries. Do they differ a lot in the challenges and concerns from other retail businesses in the Adirondacks or is it very similar?
Courtney Meisenheimer: Our framework were places that provided some level of grocery shelf stable items or some type of meat, cheese, dairy, vegetable. But then a lot of these places they function as not just one thing. They have to have a multitude of things going on. So a lot of them have delis. They're kind of this unique thing where maybe they're not comparable to a traditional retail store, something that might be selling non-food items. So, I can't say if the challenges are the same. I would imagine that just having a small business in our rural community and in our rural economy is challenging in and of itself.
Bradley: Courtney Meisenheimer, the report calls the rural markets economic anchors. Do you have any sort of analysis as to just how critical they are to Adirondack communities, whether it's an economic or cultural analysis?
Courtney Meisenheimer: Yeah, a lot of our analysis was done through conversation, sitting down and interviewing the people who work for the stores, sometimes for generations and that's where a lot of this information came from. I can't speak necessarily to this store puts X amount of dollars into the community, but I think what we do know is that they act as almost somewhat of a bellwether for the community.
If there is a strong independently owned grocery store that is a vibrant, well-supported space, I think that that correlates to seeing other indicators of vibrancy within that community. And if we see that that business is suffering, perhaps it's also indicating is there a drop in tourism? Is there a drop in people's ability to access transportation to get to these places? So I think that from the conversations we had with these store owners, we were able to see the interconnectivity that these stores play with other parts of the community and then by extension, the community's economy.
Bradley: Courtney, Adirondack Action, as you mentioned earlier, held a panel with some of the grocers that participated in producing this report. What was the overall consensus from them regarding the conclusions in the report and the needs that are reported in the report?
Courtney Meisenheimer: I think the sense from the panel was, a couple things I took away from it being there and listening to the conversation, was just how nice it was for everyone to be able to be in the same room and connect with one another. They were sharing information between best practices and challenges and it's affirming to hear other people experience those challenges. So I think I heard a lot of that at the panel.
And I heard a lot of you can show up for these businesses and really show them that you're supporting and that does go a long way, both from a business perspective, but even just in a in an intrinsic like letting them know that the community still wants them and cares about them.
Bradley: Courtney, how do you hope this report is used?
Courtney Meisenheimer: When we had the panel, we were really intentional. It wasn't open to the public, not because we didn't want the public to be there, but we really wanted to fill the room with folks who we felt had some type of ability to continue to support this sector in a unique way. How can we, as an infrastructure, support the communities?
So I'm hoping that folks who read the report and who attended the panel are feeling like they have more insight into the unique challenges. You know, when we were doing the question and answer, I could already tell there were folks in the audience who were trying to problem-solve in the moment and they were asking like, "Well, hey, you know, how about trying X, Y, and Z?" And then the panel was so gracious and being like, "Well, we have tried that but here's the challenges that we encountered doing that.”To me, it's that exchange that really helps push this conversation further beyond people's assumptions about what they think the problem is to actually really hearing it straight from the folks who are experiencing it and living it.
I think that's going to allow us to have more creative solutions that actually maybe get to the root of it. This isn't the end of our work in the rural grocery space. We know that there's more conversations to be had and we're sort of starting to think about what is the next stage of this work in this sector going to be.
