If there was no place in town to buy produce, future residents might not move there. Losing a grocery store would lead to much worse problems down the line. Schoenhofer, who works part-time for the city and part-time as a controller at a local nursing home, knew Erie couldn’t afford to let Stub’s Market go. It was an intractable problem that Cindy Schoenhofer, the treasurer of Erie, learned about quickly. Stub’s Market, Erie’s only grocery store at the time (Facebook) In the late 2010s, they put their store on sale - but no one was willing to buy it. The owners of Stub’s were looking to retire, and they couldn’t run Erie’s grocery store much longer. The city convinced Stub’s Market, which had previously occupied the location, to reopen its store before the end of the year. Getting fresh fruit and vegetables suddenly hinged on knowing someone who could make a delivery for them. Residents who couldn’t drive out of town depended on frozen meals from Dollar General. The first warning signs occurred in 2012, when the city’s only grocery store, G&W Foods, abruptly closed because it was losing so much money.įor two months, Erie didn’t have a single grocery store. That was especially true for Erie’s grocery stores. With a shrinking pool of customers to serve, local stores struggled to turn a profit. This population collapse had cascading impacts on local businesses in the city. Between 19, the town’s official head count fell by 26%, to 1,047 residents. Like many other small towns, Erie’s population waned in tandem with the decline of farming. The main street of Erie, Kansas, circa 1906 (Kansas Historical Society) Though some farming jobs still exist, many people drive outside of town for work, most often to an airplane-parts manufacturer in the nearby town of Chanute.
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Please try again!ĭelivered weekdays plus a bonus Sunday feature. “Really there’s not a lot of good jobs here,” Julie Kent, the director of Erie’s public library, told The Hustle. But today, the town’s core industry has largely disappeared. Each July, it hosts an annual soldiers’ reunion where residents cook beans in cast-iron pots over open fires, watch fireworks, and admire antique cars.Īt one time, Erie had a thriving farming community. Its main attractions include a park with dinosaurs made from junk metal and the public library. How Erie got its grocery storeĮrie has all the quaint charm one might expect to find in a small, middle-America town. To keep Stub’s Market from shuttering, the city government decided to buy it out. What followed is a rare feat of community activism. Of those, the vast majority, 213 people ( 68.5%), voted yes. In the subsequent weeks, responses to the poll began to trickle into the Erie City Council. So, the city council decided it would do just about anything to keep its only grocery store open. To find fresh meats and vegetables, residents - many of whom don’t have cars - would’ve needed to travel 10 to 20 miles out of town. That would have left Erie with only a Dollar General, a chain store with a poor selection of produce and fresh food. COVID-19 was raging, basic household items and food products were running out of stock, and Stub’s Market - the city’s only grocery store - was on the verge of closing for good. It was a dire moment for residents of Erie, a town of ~1k people in southeastern Kansas. The self-addressed envelope contained just one question: “Do you support the City of Erie purchasing Stub’s Market?”
In the final days of May 2020, residents of Erie, Kansas, received a letter in the mail from their city government.
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