On a Saturday morning in early September, Martín Mojarro Gómez pulled up to the Clark’s Market in Battlement Mesa with his son in a black pickup truck.
They wanted to buy fruit and vegetables for the weekend. Clark’s, located a few miles off I-70 behind the golf course, was their only local option.
But they found the doors locked, and the shelves inside empty. Mojarro didn’t realize that the store had closed for good the day before.
“Didn't have any signs that it was gonna be the last day,” he said. “Now, we have to drive all the way to Rifle.”
The Clark’s closure left Parachute-Battlement Mesa’s roughly 7,000 residents without a place to buy fresh produce, get subsidized infant formula, or pick up medications. To find a grocery store, they now have to drive 15-20 miles east on I-70 — at least 25 minutes by car, more by bus.
The closure will put pressure on struggling young families in need of nutrition assistance. Clark’s was the only local store where people could buy infant formula through WIC, a federal program that subsidizes the cost of formula and healthy food for low-income families.
It was also the only place to fill a prescription, so the elderly and those without reliable transportation will face new challenges accessing the next closest pharmacy in Rifle.
Mary Watson, a retiree who’s lived in Parachute for 20 years, said some of her neighbors will be reluctant to drive on the freeway.
“I can hop in the car and get to Rifle,” she said. “It's 15 miles or whatever, but it's on I-70, and people are going 80 miles an hour. Some folks are just not going to be comfortable hopping on the highway like that.”
Clark’s Market understood the impact its closure would have in Battlement Mesa, but the owner couldn’t afford to keep operating when customers in western Garfield County were shopping for most of their groceries elsewhere.
Battlement Mesa and Parachute are commuter towns, and many residents work in other parts of the region. To save money, some shop for their groceries at cheaper stores like Walmart or City Market on their way home.
As a small, family-owned grocer operating 10 stores, Clark’s couldn’t compete with larger supermarket chains and national big box stores in Rifle and Grand Junction.
“At their core, they have an ability to price a product for a customer below what we could even purchase the product for,” said Samantha Johnston, the director of marketing and community affairs for Clark’s Market.
She said it’s cheaper to order a 12-pack of Coca-Cola on Amazon than it is to walk into a Clark’s Market and buy one.
Most of Clark’s other stores are located in towns with strong tourism economies, including Aspen, Snowmass, Telluride and Sedona, where out-of-town customers are willing to pay higher prices. But the Battlement Store depended exclusively on a local customer base, said Johnston.
“There is definitely a challenge for us when customers start to say, ‘I'm going to buy most of my groceries somewhere else, but I really depend on Clark’s to grab items throughout the week that I'm missing,’” she said.
Clark’s appreciated being that resource for the community, she added, “But it’s not enough to pay the bills at the end of the day.”
A low-margin industry
It’s not just small, rural grocery stores that are struggling. Last year, Safeway announced it was closing 12 stores in the Mountain West — 10 of those were in Colorado.
Mickey Davis manages Colorado’s Community Food Access Program, a statewide initiative that offers grants to small grocers and farmers who serve low-income areas.
According to Davis, regardless of a retailer’s size, grocery stores are a “low-margin industry.” It’s not unusual for a grocer to make a 2-3% profit.
“That's really low,” she said. “That's not something a lot of investors would be excited to invest in.
Grocers have to buy lots of products, many of which are perishable and go bad before they’re sold. High oil prices and climate change can reduce those margins even further, particularly in rural areas. Food distributors often don’t want to make the trek to small, hard-to-reach communities, leading to supply challenges.
Staffing is also hard, and few people have the experience necessary to run a grocery business.
“A lot of people kind of take for granted that there's going to be a grocery store in a place where people live,” Davis said. But without a distributor, or a reliable workforce, or experience operating a grocery store, it’s a difficult business to make viable.”
When the husband-and-wife duo who owned Silverton, Colo.’s only grocery store decided to retire, Davis said they couldn’t find any local buyers. The couple ended up taking the store off the market and delaying their retirement.
In Parachute, Mary Watson and other residents are discussing short-term strategies to close the gap left by the Clark’s Market closure.
They’re making sure residents know about grocery delivery services and the Parachute Area Transport System that offers a weekday bus service to Rifle.
Watson said the town is also strategizing ways to bring back a grocery store, including finding an ideal location and establishing tax incentives to attract new investors.
But until a new grocery store opens, residents have to build new habits and make plans to buy groceries out of town.
Mojarro and his son peered into the windows of the now-empty Clark’s Market earlier this month, already thinking about what they would miss.
“The hot stuff that they sell — potato wedges, chicken,” said Mojarro.
For now, he’ll have to buy groceries in Aspen or Vail on his way home from work.
“That's gonna be tough for us,” he said. “It's gonna be tougher for the people that actually work here.”
