Musings on Food Deserts, Company Stores, and More

Where retail is concerned, often cities and communities may appear to have either too many or too few local options. What makes it so difficult to coordinate supply and demand that everyone can be happy with? In particular, the U.S. supposedly has too much retail, hence the ongoing death of numerous apparently unneeded malls. But what if the real problem isn't actually too much retail?  Chances are, much comes down to how proprietors are expected to offer their goods. Perhaps the bigger issue is retail offerings in communities lacking sufficient density (during working hours especially) for extensive infrastructure investment. Why do cities and towns make such investments necessary anyway? Especially since we're only human, and consumer tastes can change before brick and mortar stores outlive their intrinsic usefulness.

Many a community has questionable "build it and they will come" examples. Some of these enterprises even manage to remain open despite mostly empty parking lots, as potential customers continue to drive where more shopping amenities can be readily found in one place. Some of the biggest business risks in fixed locations with traditional overhead costs, are for perishable commodities. Often, the only way to stay profitable is to eliminate perishable inventory altogether.

Of course, following this limited waste rule to maintain profits and stay in business, has plenty of detractors in the media. By way of example, one hears complaints about "food deserts", especially when the "wrong stores" come to town, such as Dollar Generals which are reputed to prevent regular grocery stores from opening in the same vicinity.

There's a Dollar General in close walking distance from where I live, yet the fact it sits adjacent to the local grocery isn't unusual. I made my peace with the fact Dollar General couldn't make special orders, several years ago. The fact they don't, probably helps to explain how they can stay open in towns with a limited customer base. I'm just glad for the merchandise they do carry, which saves so many trips out of my small hometown. Meanwhile, the local grocery does its level best to stock as much fresh produce as possible, in spite of the fact many potential customers make the drive elsewhere to larger towns. It's discouraging to think how much fresh produce must go to waste! As a former business owner, I remember all too well, wanting to carry more perishables than could realistically be sold locally. If only the individuals who complain about Dollar Generals and food deserts could know what is actually at stake.

What about produce markets and flea markets for fresh products? For a long time this was a viable option for self employment. Decades earlier, one could find flea markets wherever they happened to travel. Indeed I would have gone back to flea market selling were it possible, once rising rents got to a point brick and mortar locations were finally out of reach. Some of what is involved for the future financial security of millions, is simply overcoming the lifestyle illusion which tries to mandate everyone living as though they can afford a standard middle class lifestyle.

One historical consumer complaint could hardly seem more different than food deserts: Mandated local shopping! Many of us of a certain age recall Tennessee Ford singing "Saint Peter don't you call me cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store." The company towns of a century or so earlier, often ruled over their citizens like small authoritarian governments. At the very least, these were small decentralized versions of authoritarianism not overly difficult to exit. Many a restless or otherwise "fed up" local could vote with their feet to leave, and frequently did. The ones who willingly stayed, were often happy with the local abundance of the company store.

Nameless Towns is a historical sketch of Texas sawmill communities as company towns, from 1880 to 1942. I really enjoyed this book, in part because it took me back in time to places my family came from. Two grandparents lived and worked in Nacogdoches, near the edge of what was once a vast and ancient longleaf pine forest. Company towns finally cut down the last of these majestic trees in the early forties and then disbanded. Another of my grandparents worked as a sharecropper in these thinly settled regions, and I have little doubt he would have been too independent minded for the hierarchical demands of company towns! Although that likely didn't stop him from selling a little moonshine (along with fresh garden produce) to their inhabitants from time to time, even during Prohibition.

What determined the extent of company operations in these deep woods? Thad Sitton and James Conrad explain:

The number and importance of private businesses in company sawmill towns seem quite variable, and this matter probably relates to critical decisions companies made at the origins of their towns. Very occasionally, companies like Lufkin-Land (later Long-Bell), Angelina County Lumber, and Thompson-Tucker chose to set up operations immediately adjacent to major market towns, such as Lufkin and Trinity. In these cases, private businesses lay just beyond the sawmill-town perimeters from the beginning, and there was nothing the companies could do about them except offer full-service towns, including commissaries, drugstores, schools, and boardinghouses, and pay only in merchandise checks. However, the merchandise check and company social pressure to trade at the commissary often did a remarkable job of keeping employees on the reservation, especially in the early days. Around 1910, for example, a Lufkin resident recalled that downtown merchants in the county-seat town catered mainly to the cotton-farming trade despite the presence of two 100,000-board-feet-a-day mill operations immediately adjacent to the municipality. Company economic policies effectively insulated workers from the nearby "cotton town". 

Much more commonly, however, companies bought land and set up new towns in the remote countryside close to their timber holdings, and in this case they had the option of keeping all land in company ownership and leasing it out to private businesses on a case-by-case basis, or of selling off big blocks of property in their towns to whomever paid the price. 

By the time the petroleum company town of my youth set up camp for its resident workers, the work of logging company towns was almost done. Newer versions of company towns, once many families purchased automobiles and traveled more widely, were certainly far less hierarchical. For instance my mother recalled that while engineers did live in a separate row of houses, they were built the same as any other camp houses. There was one commonality with the earlier company towns, however. These neighbors still spent their days socializing with one another, and like the children of the sawmill towns, children in the latter version had the same freedom as well, to roam about the entire neighborhood as they desired.

Once most families gained access to reliable transportation, company towns and their associated stores became a thing of the past. Initially in the fifties and sixties, local Main Street retail was prosperous in towns of all sizes. But by the time families were able to purchase two vehicles, consequently working too far from home to shop locally during the day, these Main Streets began to decline. In a sense, Main Street became the first retail deserts of our time. What might we expect in the near future, as the process reverses and families own fewer vehicles, in particular outside today's prosperous regions? How far in a different direction, might small communities go from the well to do cities of the present? Right now it is anyone's guess.