On the way home from work Thursday night, I stopped at Kroger’s to grab a gallon of milk. Even though I knew the store was closing in a week, I was taken aback by the number of empty shelves.
No soft drinks. Very few vegetables. Not too many potato chips. None of my favorite juice drinks, particularly the white cranberry strawberry flavor.
I get it. No need to keep the place fully stocked. Still, it was a visual reminder of what a going-out-of-business operation looks like. It’s a shame.
Even though I’ve shopped at several groceries in Pike County, Kroger was my favorite one, and for totally sentimental reasons.
When I moved to McComb in 1983, I was driving down Delaware Avenue looking for food, and was thrilled to see the store because it brought back childhood memories.
As a youngster, my family lived in South Bend, Ind., from 1964-69, and I very well remember my mom taking me to a Kroger store there.
One time I got lost in the store and ran into the parking lot, chasing my mother in her red jacket. Except that it was someone else, and it took a couple of minutes before my mom rounded me up.
I was single in McComb for four years. Back then, there was no Wal-Mart, and Kroger was closest to my duplex on Burke Street. So I rarely went to the old Jitney Jungle store or one of the Sunflowers.
I occasionally stopped at Vaccarella’s downtown because it was near the old newspaper office and because Frank Vaccarella, the owner, was such an interesting guy.
Aside from the childhood stuff, the people at the McComb Kroger were always nice. A cashier who worked there in the 1980s or ’90s told me she enjoyed the newspaper’s annual cooking school. So for years afterward, when I was speaking to the cooking school audience, I would ask, “Is Regina from Kroger’s here?” More often than not, she was.
But now, Kroger’s is leaving McComb and I will miss it — even though the company should have renovated the place 20 years ago or moved to a bigger location.
Its next-door neighbor, the CVS drugstore, also is closing. When that place was an Eckerd’s and my kids were little, they made a lot of money off me by developing and printing roll after roll of film.
Some people have said that the departure of these two stores is another signal of McComb’s problems. It’s certainly disappointing that Kroger and CVS have decided they can’t make enough money here. But we ought to keep these corporate decisions in perspective.
A little internet sleuthing shows that Kroger is currently making its first inroads into the giant Florida market — and doing it without stores. It is using an automated warehouse the size of eight football fields along with delivery drivers to attract new customers.
It makes sense that the company will close a few smaller stores to focus on ventures like that. None of us in small towns like it, but that’s the way the world works.
And really, the thing to keep in mind is that there are plenty of other grocery chains that could take Kroger’s place.
When I was paying Thursday night, I got to talking with the cashier about the store closing. She said she’d heard about two possible replacements: one based in another state, and the other a foreign company that only recently expanded into the American grocery market.
Those were the same two that I’ve heard about. This doesn’t mean either one is coming; maybe the existing groceries will keep all the former Kroger customers.
History may provide a useful guide here. I remember when Jitney moved from just off South Broadway to a brand-new shopping center on Delaware Avenue in the 1980s. After the company got bought by Winn-Dixie, the McComb store hung on for a few years before closing.
But The Markets, a Natchez-based grocery company, stepped right up and has been a solid business here since 2005. McComb Market opened just three months after Hurricane Katrina — quite a sign of confidence in this area.
The remaining groceries and drugstores may prefer that the Kroger and CVS sites become a bowling center. But food and medicine are competitive businesses, and it is not at all daydreaming to believe that other companies are already looking at McComb.
