General
Can the Only Grocery Store in a Rural Michigan Town Stay Independent?
The owners of Honor Family Market are ready to retire. A buyer would face the tight margins of a small business and competition against the giant chains and discount stores.
The town of Honor, in northern Michigan, doesn’t have too many places to shop for food. The only grocery store in town is Honor Family Market, one of a shrinking number of independent grocers left in the United States.
Because it’s the only market in town, it has an outsize 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 — in Honor and elsewhere in Benzie County — go to buy meat and produce. It’s also where they can go to get free — or at a reduced cost — food and supplies for community events like football games or the annual National Coho Salmon Festival in the summer.
The store has nine full- and nine part-time workers, and hundreds of Honor’s high school students have worked their first jobs there, sweeping the well-worn linoleum floor, stacking groceries in the narrow aisles or bagging at the three checkout lanes.
The store is “paramount for a healthy, living, breathing community,” said Ingemar Johansson, a resident and president of Honor Area Restoration Project, a nonprofit business development group. “Everybody shops there. You run into somebody you know every time you go.”
