Life in a Food Desert: The Disappearance of Mom & Pop Stores

Joe's Market, Bangor, Maine

I first wrote about Bangor’s food deserts in 2016. “How do you go grocery shopping without a car?” a friend had asked me. “I live in a food desert. The nearest grocery stores are all about three miles away. And there’s no convenient bus you can take to any of them.”

She and her husband lived on the “tree streets” near Northern Light Hospital, within walking distance of a bus stop and several businesses, including a gas station and a doughnut shop. But any trip to a grocery store required at least two buses and sometimes a long wait.

“There’s no real food within easy reach of bus or bicycle,” she said. “I’m stuck in a walking neighborhood with two cars.”

You live in a food desert if you are more than walking distance from the nearest quart of milk, or if getting the ingredients for tonight’s dinner requires driving a car. The term became popular in the last decades of the twentieth century, when neighborhood grocery stores began to disappear.

Over the past ten years, it’s only gotten worse. The deserts are spreading. On a recent summer morning in downtown Bangor, I spoke with Joe Perry, Maine’s current state treasurer and longtime small grocery store owner. I listened as he ticked off the names of stores within a three-mile radius that have closed during that time.

“Just in this part of Bangor, I could show you a dozen small markets that are gone,” Perry said. “People could easily walk there, and they could get the basics.”

Two were in my neighborhood. If one store didn’t have a can of green beans, I could walk a couple of extra blocks to see if other one did. Both stores are gone.

Perry grew up in Veazie and has been in the retail grocery business since 1993. His store on Garland Street remains open, though he sold it to his nephew last February. It’s one of the last of its kind in a city once dotted with them. “About half my customers were on foot,” Perry said.

Stores like Joe’s Market are anchors of walkable communities. They allow people to get milk, eggs, juice, bread, fruit, pet food, toiletries, and household items without using a car. They often serve as de facto neighborhood meeting places.

But Mom and Pop groceries seem to be vanishing at an accelerating rate. Perry cited several interconnected reasons.

Maine’s “blue laws” that prohibited large stores from opening on Sunday (and drove customers to local markets) were repealed in the 1980s. The number of distributors in Maine has shrunk from six to two as wholesalers have consolidated. And those distributors don’t provide the level of service they used to. One is owned by a national corporation that has bought out

local distributorships across the country.

“With consolidation came larger minimum orders,” Perry said. “Wal-Mart and mass retailers squeezed everyone on every level, including suppliers of small stores.”

Small stores pay the same credit card fees as large national retailers, but take a much larger hit in percentage of profit.

The merging of gas stations and convenience stores has siphoned off customers. “We need to sell the lottery tickets and cigarettes to keep the doors open,” Perry said. But local customers also want the option of walking to the store when they can’t or don’t want to drive to Hannaford’s or Shaw’s. “We need people who don’t need us to choose us,” Perry said.

According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance [ilsr.org], a neighborhood advocacy organization founded in 1974, the most significant blow to small stores’ sustainability happened in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration directed the Federal Trade Commission to stop enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act, a key piece of New Deal antitrust legislation prohibiting price discrimination by suppliers.

That was the signal for Wal-Mart and other mega-retailers to demand sharp discounts based on volume, forcing suppliers to raise prices on small and independent stores. By 2001, Wal-Mart was the largest grocery retailer in the U.S.

Writing on the ILSR website in 2024, Stacy Mitchell states, “…from the 1930s to the 1980s, the U.S. grocery industry was remarkably competitive… Independent stores consistently accounted for more than 50 percent of grocery sales [while] the four largest chains collectively captured only about 20 percent of the market. Virtually every neighborhood and small town had

a grocery store, and many had several.”

Is there any hope? City governments can look at things like zoning and insurance regulations, which have discouraged mixed-use neighborhoods where people live close to stores.

As an individual consumer, you can make a point of patronizing small stores whenever you can.

And make sure to pay in cash.

Hank Garfield, also known as Henry Garfield, is originally from Philadelphia but moved with his family to Blue Hill, Maine at the age of ten. His first writing job was as a reporter for the Ellsworth bureau of the Bangor Daily News. In 1983, he moved to Southern California, where he remained until relocating to Belfast, Maine in 1999. Save for a recent year in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, he has been a Bangor resident since 2006, living within walking distance of downtown.

His collection of essays about living in a rural area without a car is due from 12 Willows Press in 2027.