{"id":5708,"date":"2025-02-04T12:14:32","date_gmt":"2025-02-04T17:14:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/?p=5708"},"modified":"2025-02-18T09:37:04","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T14:37:04","slug":"small-town-grocery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/small-town-grocery\/","title":{"rendered":"Small-Town Grocery"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Outsized community role<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By Keith Schneider<\/strong>
Current Contributor<\/strong>

The choreography inside a small, independent, rural grocery store is on display daily at Honor Family Market. Tim Schneider\u2014one of four siblings, all in their 60s and 70s, who own and manage the store\u2014stacks packaged goods in one of the seven aisles. Younger brother Patrick Schneider prepares prime cuts of beef and homemade sausage behind the butcher\u2019s counter. A sister, Marilyn Edginton, oversees the bakery. Her younger sister, Helen Schneider, manages the produce department and oversees accounts, ordering, and payroll in the office. 

Because it is the only market in town, it has an outsized role in this community of 330 residents. The 12,000-square-foot store, its shelves filled with local products like honey, baked goods, and homemade bratwursts, is not only a place where people\u2014in Honor and elsewhere in Benzie County\u2014go to buy meat, wine, beer, and produce. It is also where they can go to get free, or at a reduced cost, food and supplies for community events, like football games in the fall or the annual National Coho Salmon Festival in the summer.

\u201cIt\u2019s paramount for a healthy, living, breathing community,\u201d says Ingemar Johansson, a resident and president of Honor Area Restoration Project (HARP), a nonprofit business development group. \u201cEverybody shops there. You run into somebody you know every time you go.\u201d  

The store employs nine full-time and nine part-time workers; hundreds of Honor\u2019s high school students have worked their first jobs in the store, sweeping the well-worn linoleum floor, stacking groceries in the narrow aisles, or bagging at the three checkout lanes. The market\u2019s location in the small shopping plaza along US-31 makes the market convenient to hundreds of workers who commute between Benzie and Traverse City.

\u201cWe\u2019re an independent grocery store that knows its customers and what they want,\u201d Tim Schneider says. \u201cThe value of our store is the fact that it\u2019s close to a lot of people in how they live and where they live.\u201d

Confronting Trend in Grocery Economy
<\/strong>How long the Honor Family Market remains a local institution, though, is far from assured. 

The Schneiders are ready to join the mammoth tide of 9 million Baby Boom business owners that are retiring. They hope to keep the store independent\u2014a herculean task during a time of industry consolidation that has pushed up grocery prices. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Curtis D. Kuttnauer\u2014managing director of Golden Circle Advisors, a Traverse City-based investment bank that specializes in selling small businesses\u2014says that the Schneider\u2019s goal is impeded by powerful headwinds in and outside of Northern Michigan, including consolidation in the grocery sector, tight lending for low-margin businesses, and the well-researched difficulty of selling small, rural businesses.\u00a0

Keeping Honor Family Market independent, in effect, requires a buyer who is willing to not only take on the tight margins of a small business but also compete against the giant chains. For instance, the Dollar Tree\u2014located right next door in the plaza\u2014competes for sales of toiletries, paper goods, detergents, and snacks.

\u201cThree-quarters of businesses put on the market don\u2019t sell,\u201d Kuttnauer says. \u201cWhat makes rural businesses more difficult to sell is that most need to be operated locally; being rural limits the pool of buyers.\u201d

From 1990 to 2015, the number of independent grocery stores in the United States dropped 39 percent to 2,648, with an average of 30 stores closing every year, according to a 2021 report<\/a> by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).\u00a0

That suggests there are roughly 300 fewer stores today than in 2015 nationally. Several of those local groceries that closed are near the Honor Family Market: Deering\u2019s Market in Empire closed in 2018; Gabe\u2019s Market in Maple City closed in 2019; Kaleva Meats closed in 2019; and the Schneiders\u2019 Copemish Family Market closed in 2021.\u00a0

Virtually all independent groceries operate within tight margins in a hypercompetitive $846 billion industry in which a significant portion of all grocery sales<\/a> goes to just four companies: Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, and Walmart.\u00a0

Weakening Competition, Hurting Small Grocers
<\/strong>The Schneiders have certainly felt the whip of consolidation. The number of wholesale food distributors that served their grocery in the 1990s diminished from seven in the region to one in Grand Rapids, owned by Spartan Foods\u2014which notably owns and operates two Family Fare chain stores in Benzie County and 79 other grocery stores in Michigan.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Honor Family Market’s welcoming entrance. Because it is the only grocery store in town, it has an outsized role in this community of 330 residents. The 12,000-square-foot store, its shelves filled with local products like honey, baked goods, and homemade bratwursts, is not only a place where people\u2014in Honor and elsewhere in Benzie County\u2014go to buy meat, wine, beer, and produce. Photo by Keith Schneider.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In other words, Honor Family Market is captive to Spartan Foods\u2019 pricing.

\u201cWalmart doesn\u2019t want to sell to me; Meijer only does its own stores,\u201d  Tim Schneider says. \u201cSpartan is pretty much it.\u201d

Rial Carver directs the Rural Grocery Initiative at Kansas State University.

\u201cIt\u2019s a big challenge,\u201d Carver says. \u201cRural grocers have fewer options for stocking their stores, and they are at a competitive disadvantage with supercenters and discount retailers. We\u2019ve seen the number of independent grocers has dropped 15 percent over the last decade or so.\u201d

The industry\u2019s concentration, economists have said, was allowed to happen largely by decades of weak enforcement of antitrust laws, particularly the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936<\/a>, which forbids price discrimination that could wipe out competition in an industry.

\u201cFor the next almost 50 years, the Federal Trade Commission vigorously enforced the law,\u201d says Stacy Mitchell, an expert in monopolies and a co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit group that provides technical support to communities for sustainable development. \u201cFor all those decades, the market structure was about half independent grocers and about half chains.\u201d

But that started to change in the 1980s, when the FTC \u201csuspended enforcement,\u201d Mitchell says, because President Ronald Reagan (R: 1981-1989) and several other administrations that followed saw improving efficiency with larger grocery stores as a priority over ensuring competition.

In addition to the Dollar Tree in Honor and the two Family Fares in Benzonia and Frankfort, there are nearly a dozen discount dollar stores in and around Benzie County: a Dollar General in Copemish, Interlochen, Kaleva, Long Lake, Thompsonville, two in Bear Lake, one more in Springdale Township, as well as just outside Frankfort and along US-31 between Honor and Interlochen; there is also a Family Dollar in Benzonia. (Editor\u2019s Note: <\/strong>The Betsie Current <\/em>published an article by Jacob Wheeler on dollar stores in December 2019; read in our online archives<\/a>. Also check out Wheeler\u2019s most recent update to this ongoing story online.)

Resolve to Stay Open
<\/strong>The Schneiders are experts in navigating the changing economic landscape of the grocery sector. They were raised in the business by their father, Leroy Schneider, a career food service manager\u2014Roy and Rose Schneider sold the Eastfield Thriftway in Traverse City in 1974 when they \u201cretired,\u201d though they kept their hands in the family business many years later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Honor Family Market\u2019s meat counter is an essential asset for the store\u2019s customer traffic and revenue. Photo by Keith Schneider.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Schneider siblings bought their first grocery store in 1980 in Copemish\u2014a similarly tiny town, located just 15 miles south of Honor\u2014for $175,000. They bought the store in Honor from Chuck Link in 1992 for $400,000.

Slower sales during the pandemic, and the family\u2019s desire to shrink their scope of work, prompted the Copemish store to close in 2021\u2014the family would have preferred to sell the store, but they never found a buyer. So the Schneiders retained ownership of the 15,000-square-foot building that now serves as a vehicle warehouse for Crystal Mountain Resort, the county\u2019s largest private employer. 

The family also put the Honor store on the market that same year, in 2021\u2014now listed for $1.1 million\u2014and subsequently hired and fired three brokers. But the lone buyer who expressed interest in the Honor store failed to show up at closing in 2023, because of a lack of funds. 

The Schneiders say the market resistance is surprising, given the sturdiness of the economy in Benzie County and across the rural northern counties close to Lake Michigan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The spirits aisle in Honor Family Market offers Benzie County\u2019s best array of bourbon and wine. Photo by Keith Schneider.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Since the start of the century, Benzie County\u2019s population has increased about 15 percent to more than 18,000. Many of the new residents who arrived during and after the pandemic are wealthier members of the Baby Boom and Gen X. 

Since 2019, the county has added nearly 400 new jobs\u2014an 8 percent increase\u2014and is among the five fastest-growing labor markets in the state, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And it is not just seasonal summer work.

Winter unemployment\u2014which soared to 19 percent here in the early 1990s\u2014dropped to 6 percent earlier this year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. 

Not that long ago, household incomes in Honor were under $45,000 a year, most residents were graying, and the largest building in the worn business district was an abandoned turn-of-the-20th-century Masonic Lodge.

The village now is a display of the stronger economy. 

The dilapidated lodge is gone, replaced by affordable townhomes. A 52-acre, $1 million town park\u2014paid for with state, foundation, and donor funds\u2014opened last summer along the banks of the Platte River, which flows through the village. (Editor\u2019s Note: <\/strong>The Betsie Current <\/em>published a piece by Keith Schneider on the new Platte River Park in May 2024; read in our online archives.<\/a>)

In September, TrueNorth, an Ohio-based company, opened a gas station and convenience store, while a new coffee shop, Weldon Coffee, also opened. 

In November, Sleeping Bear Motor Sports, a motorcycle and recreational vehicle dealer, moved from Interlochen to a newly renovated building in Honor.

Even two of Honor\u2019s specialty businesses, the Cherry Bowl Drive-In Theater, one of the last of Michigan\u2019s outdoor movie theaters, and Field Crafts, a screen printer, completed sales last year to new owners. 

The question becomes: will the Honor Family Market sale go through?

For 33 years, the Schneiders\u2019 full-service market has served enough essential purposes as a source of food, employment, and civic gathering that few Honor residents can imagine anything other than every day, without interruption, its doors opening at 9 a.m. and closing around 6 p.m., except for Sunday, when they shut three hours earlier.

As Marilyn [Schneider] Edginton bakes fresh bread for the lunch crowd, Tim Schneider stacks packaged goods. Patrick Schneider tends to customers from behind the spotless glass of his meat counter. The digital cash registers, which Helen Schneider manages, chirp at the checkout lines up front.

\u201cWe\u2019re staying until we sell\u2014we\u2019re agreed on that,\u201d Edginton says. \u201cThe next owner is going to have new ideas and things they want to do when they buy this store. It\u2019s really not that hard. Stuff comes in the back door. We put a price on it, move it to the middle, send it out the front, and hopefully we make some money.\u201d

A <\/em>version of this article was published<\/em><\/a> by <\/em>The New York Times <\/em><\/strong>on January 14, 2025. Keith Schneider, although having the same last name, is not related to the Schneider family who own Honor Family Market.<\/em>

Honor Family Market is located at 10625 Main Street\/US-31 in Honor. Call 231-325-3360 or email honorfamilymkt@centurytel.net for more information. Learn more at “Honor Family Market” on Facebook.<\/a><\/em>

Featured Photo Caption: <\/strong>Patrick Schneider (left) and Tim Schneider (right) are two of the four Schneider siblings who have owned and managed the Honor Family Market since 1992. Photo by Keith Schneider.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Amber Weitzel recently returned to Benzie County and to the Honor Family Market, where she worked in the 1990s. Photo by Keith Schneider.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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