Martin’s opening won’t signal ‘the end’ for town’s other grocery store

“The report of my death has been grossly exaggerated.” - Mark Twain

Culpeper has been so swept up in Martin’s-mania lately, it’s hard to remember that it is just a grocery store. And a pharmacy. And a gas station! Oh my! How did we ever live here without this store?

Excuse my enthusiasm, it’s only mostly in jest. I welcome Martin’s as much as most of my neighbors have (the store wasn’t open two days before my whole family was strolling through the aisles), but I won’t buy in to the theory that the “little Giant” will be putting all the other grocery stores around town out of business any time soon.

Last week I tried to remind you that we’re still living in “Two Americas.” Well, we’re also living in two Culpepers, though the divide is less determined by financial lines and instead by geographical ones (traffic trumps all weekly specials). As Martin’s joins Target and Aldi on the north side (of what, I’m not sure, since they’re not in town), Food Lion and Safeway will still anchor the south-siders. And nary the twain shall meet — except maybe while we all wait to check out at Walmart.

We’ll see what happens to all the local stores when the hoopla dies down (grocery store enthusiasm seems to be spreading like the H1N1 virus), and their out-of-town representatives return to their offices. It’s not so much that pressure from above kept these stores looking ship-shape over the past week, as much as it was just possible to do more with more hands on deck.

And that, to me, is the biggest problem with the places we’re eulogizing this week.

It’s easy to blame those working and running our existing groceries, but for most of them the size of their staffs doesn’t match the size of their stores. We’ve probably all commented during our weekly shopping trips that “expired” fruit should be removed from the display, that “outdated” packaged food and dairy products should be trashed, and we wonder why they have so many checkout lines if only a quarter of them are ever open.

What we’re really saying, without saying it, is this store doesn’t have enough help. A grocery store is a living organism. Between produce, dairy, meat and fish (oh, and the in-store floral shops), you have a system that must stay in balance or else the flaws start to show.

Someone told me recently they were in the Wegman’s in Gainesville, and there was an employee in the produce department turning all the apples looking for spots and placing their best sides forward. That might be excessive, but you know what they say about one bad apple ... it makes all your customers wish for competition.

I don’t want to sound critical of Martin’s, they do have a beautiful store. And I’m even more excited to see them join our community, because they have made great efforts to do just that — join our community.

My first interaction with them was at a “Third Thursday” concert downtown where I signed up for my shopper’s card, and my son spun the wheel and was handed a bag full of groceries topped with a package of cookies (They had him at hello). It wasn’t so much the giveaways that got me, though, it was that I met them at a downtown concert.

I can’t begin to name all the local groups who’ve been touched in the past month by the Martin’s. Maybe it’s a payoff, but more likely it’s a reminder that the store doesn’t make the community, the community makes the store.

And for all of the other chains around town, you have my sympathies. Not because Martin’s is going to directly put any one of you out of business, but because each of your employees is just going to be asked to work that much harder to try and keep up.

Clements’ column runs every Monday on the editorial page.