As I began writing this essay on Sunday afternoon, April 14, the sky over Pagosa Springs was early-spring blue, and the temperature was a balmy 57 degrees. I had stopped by the Ruby Sisson Library on South 8th Street to snap a photo of the empty parking lot across the street, and the beautiful snow-capped peaks in the distance.
The parking lot in front of the Hometown Market has never been overcrowded, except maybe on the day the market first opened its doors in September 2015. And now that the store has officially been sold, and is closed for business… well… no wonder the parking lot was empty.
My granddaughters and I had stopped by, on Saturday, to read the farewell sign on the door:
Attn. Customers,
We have sold our store and want to let you know how much we sincerely appreciate all our great loyal customers, your smiles, and your friendship. Thank you for the last 4 years. And please support the new store.
— Ed & Dana Sowards
Our Town government had worked hard to entice someone to open a grocery store in this downtown shopping center after the building was vacated by City Market in 2011, and the Town had arranged some tax incentives — about $500,000 worth — to help convince the Sowards to take a chance on this location, within walking distance of Pagosa’s numerous older, and perhaps less-affluent, neighborhoods.
But the store never really took off. The new Walmart had opened its doors 6 months earlier, with a sizable grocery section, and the uptown City Market was doing a major remodel that same year. Tough competition.
Seems to me, the people of Pagosa Springs — myself included — generally treated Hometown Market like a large convenience store. We’d swing by to pick up one or two items, maybe three. A loaf of bread. A bag of chips. An onion. A bottle of Coke. I can’t recall ever seeing someone pushing a full shopping cart.
From Jeff Laydon’s Daily Post photo essay, from September 2015:
Hometown Food Markets is a family-owned business, and they want to bring to this community, solid hometown values — way beyond just groceries.
The Sowards also have a store in Antonito, CO. Ed held up a family photo taken at their Grand Opening more than a decade ago, showing his now-grown kids at the store. Those kids are now working here in the Pagosa Springs store. He was moved emotionally to describe the hard decisions and hard work the family has gone through to make this store happen.
During the ribbon cutting ceremony in 2015, the Soward family had been flanked by Mayor Don Volger and several members of the Pagosa Springs Town Council and a few other business leaders who had worked to encourage a full-service grocery store in the historical downtown. But the model of a small, independent grocery store — selling essentially the same items as a nearby Walmart, but at a noticeably higher price — doesn’t pencil in 21st century America. The question probably wasn’t if Hometown Market would close, but when.
According to Town documents, the new occupant of the South 8th Street store will be Natural Grocers.
Natural Grocers is a Colorado-based health food chain with about 148 locations in 19 states — including 37 stores in Colorado. It’s been growing by leaps and bounds since its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in July 2012, which raised $107 million.
The business was founded in 1955 as a door-to-door sales operation by Margaret and Philip Isely. They opened their first ‘Vitamin Cottage’ store in Lakewood, Colorado in 1963. Beginning in 2008, ‘Vitamin Cottage Natural Grocers’ phased in a name change to ‘Natural Grocers by Vitamin Cottage,’ to emphasize groceries rather than nutritional supplements. The corporation’s net sales in 2018 were about $850 million.
A visit to employment website Indeed.com suggests that the company is not yet hiring for the Pagosa location. Former and current employees have posted reviews of the company on this same website, and the average ranking nationwide is 3.4 — similar to what Walmart and City Market have earned as employee rankings on Indeed.com.
It appears that Natural Grocers, nationally, pays less than $12 per hour for a cashier position.
Will Pagosa Springs embrace Natural Grocers? And will Natural Grocers fall in love with Pagosa Springs?
I suppose nearly everyone who has fallen in love with our little town — and who has then relocated here with a partner, or family, or by themselves — has harbored the hope that the community would stay pretty much the way it was when they first experienced it.
Falling in love is like that. We focus primarily on our beloved’s attractive features, and don’t really notice the so-called flaws. And we sorta hope he or she will stay that way, forever. But eventually, the flaws have their way of coming unpleasantly to the surface. And our beloved does not stay the same. He or she changes — a natural part of growing older — and we, ourselves, change. Sometimes the changes are so dramatic that we can no longer bear to live together.
Same goes for a town. A community doesn’t stay the same. The changes are a natural part of growing older, but they’re not always pleasant to experience.
From what I can tell from reviewing various data sources, over the past seven or eight years more people have moved into Archuleta County than have moved away, and the rate of births in the community has been slightly higher than the death rate. But the median age has gradually become older, with an average now of 50 years. In Colorado as a whole, folks over the age of 65 make up about 14 percent of the population. Here in Pagosa, it’s about 26 percent.
Obviously, some of the changes we’ve experienced were bestowed upon us by the Big World Outside. But certain changes arose from within our community.
For example. Over the past decade, our community leaders have worked diligently, and spent millions of dollars in taxpayer revenues, encouraging our tourism industry. And the data indicates that the effort has been reasonably successful, if you use as your measure of success the number of dollars spent on temporary lodging (as measured by Lodgers Taxes collections.)
But if you use, as your measure of success, the availability of high-paying jobs or affordable housing… well, that’s a different type of measurement. A somewhat depressing type, in fact.