Molly Talbot-Metz wanted so badly for it to work – a name grocery store bringing name brands to a blighted end of town, where supermarket options nearly all of this century have been either generic products or nothing.
Ruth Littlejohn wanted it just as badly.
James Talley misses the place already.
Ken Kolb is not surprised it didn’t work.
When Piggly Wiggly opened its Spartanburg location in August of 2022, there was ample reason to be hopeful. The City of Spartanburg and the Mary Black Foundation (MBF) had joined to put $900,000 into the supermarket. The neighbors had been clamoring for a place to shop where a Save A Lot store had once stood in South Church Plaza – itself a respite from the three-to-five-mile trips to the nearest Ingles, Food Lion, or Walmart stores that are variably serviced by city bus routes.
Thirteen months later, however, in September of 2023, the store closed down; $900,000 in impact investment loans from MBF to the city to the store gone, leaving the residents of the Southside neighborhoods wringing South Church Plaza without a supermarket again and leaving the city to pay for a vacant space.
“The agreement that the Mary Black Foundation made with the city was that part of the loan was guaranteed by the city,” said Talbot-Metz, executive director of MBF. “We will receive some of the loan funds back. Others will be a loss.”
The loss of the Piggly Wiggly, however, stings on a deeper level than money. While Talbot-Metz said she stands behind the investment – and the market research that she says pointed to an optimistic future for the store – Talley said the Piggly Wiggly closing so soon serves as a reminder that the community it was intended to serve routinely has to deal with disappointment and failure.
“It made me wonder, what are we going to do now?” Talley said. “Where do we go from here?”
At 83, Talley drives to the other supermarkets in town, but said he preferred the convenience of having a name-brand store just a few blocks from his house in the Hampton Heights neighborhood. But while he preferred the closeness – and an excuse to not have to use gas getting somewhere else – Talley said many of his neighbors turned against the store before it ever had the chance to get off the ground.
“There were some that really relied on it,” he said. “Then, for some reason, there were some that came up with a vendetta against it; they started talking about the prices and they started talking about, was this fresh enough, was that fresh enough? I guess some people expected the prices to be low because it was Piggly Wiggly.”
Talley suspects – as does City Councilwoman Ruth Littlejohn – that a kind of price nostalgia doomed the store. Remember, Spartanburg’s Piggly Wiggly operated in the same building in which Save A Lot had operated. Save A Lot is a discount store chain most famous for selling private label (i.e., generic) groceries, which tend to be less expensive than name brands.
And the last day that Save A Lot was open for business was in 2019, when an 18-ounce box of (admittedly name brand) Cheerios cost about $4. Closing in on five years and one inflation-inducing pandemic later, that 18-ounce box will cost you $7.99 at the Piggly Wiggly in Columbia (which is now one of the chain’s closest locations to Spartanburg).
Littlejohn said that shoppers expecting 2019 Save A Lot prices were not happy with 2022-23 prices at Piggly Wiggly, even though the latter’s prices were “pretty much the same” as those at Ingles, Food Lion, and Walmart.
While Littlejohn said she would have liked to see the store hang on for a little longer, that had it gutted through, it might have been able to survive, she feels that COVID was “the demon” that doomed the store before it had much of a chance to make itself part of the community.
But for Ken Kolb, chair of the sociology department at Furman University and author of the book, Retail Inequality, the death of the Spartanburg Piggly Wiggly was foreseeable and quantifiable. Kolb said that trying to solve so complex a problem as food insecurity with so singular a solution as dropping a supermarket into a food desert simply cannot work.
The quantifiable part, the math, however, breaks down to a simple equation for Kolb: 900,000 divided by 261.
The 900,000 figure is the amount of dollars pumped into the project by the city and MBF to help float the Piggly Wiggly as it got off the ground (and it takes a lot of money to get a supermarket off the ground, even a Save A Lot, which, according to its website costs between $600,000 and $2.1 million to get going). The 261 figure is the number of households in what the U.S. Census Bureau defines as “near poverty.”
“The near poor are people living at 100 to 150 percent of the poverty level,” Kolb said. “Think of a family of four making between $24,000 and $36,000 a year. They are really kind of hovering above mild catastrophe. They've got it together, but a flat tire or a kid's runny nose can cost them a job, which can create a downward spiral for them.”
And in the two Census tracts that comprise the neighborhood that the Spartanburg Piggly Wiggly was intended to serve, he said, there were 261 near-poor households that could have most benefitted from having a supermarket in close reach – hardly enough, he said, to keep a store open.
And while Kolb said he is 100 percent behind investing in supermarkets in food deserts, he would rather see a different approach – one that invests in the community and the people rather than the store itself.
“Had we poured that $900,000 into roughly 261 households making between $25,000 and $40,000 a year, we could have effectively given each one of those households a $150 coupon for food once a month for three years,” Kolb said. “How could that have changed lives? What would that have done for their disposable income in being able to support other businesses that could have kept other shops in business? I don't know, but that's the experiment that I'm ready for, because we're about 15 years into bribing grocery stores to move into under-resourced areas, and while I'm all for it, because I think that's a good, healthy, wholesome form of retail to invest in, it's still been a business-first, supply side-first solution. I think it's time to maybe chart a new path.”
