Years of decline shuttered Allendale County grocery stores

One of the defining moments in Phyllis Smart’s role as a community organizer was when someone told her of an elderly man in the Town of Fairfax who couldn’t feed himself.

The man was a recent widower on medication whose health was deteriorating and couldn’t feed himself. So, Smart began showing up to his house three times a day to feed him. However, after two weeks, the man died of what Smart believes to be preventable malnourishment.

“It broke me,” Smart said. “I was broken.”

As Allendale County has emptied, Smart, church leaders and other community members have witnessed the human cost of the county’s nutrition crisis. In the Town of Fairfax — where long-time residents tell stories of a town that once had a plentiful number of grocery stores — the only evidence of a grocery store is Gatlin’s IGA, an abandoned building that collects weeds, dust and the occasional fresh sheet of drywall.

However, getting food in Allendale County has not always been a problem. In the late 1950’s, when Joe Owens was growing up, there was no shortage of grocery stores in the county, and if he didn’t like one grocery store, he could walk down the street to another.

“I remember there were about seven or eight of them when I was coming up,” Owens said. “It’s frustrating to see it now.”

For years, the only grocery store for the nearly 8,000 residents of Allendale County has been Allendale IGA, located on Highway 278, and attempts to bring another grocery store to the county have repeatedly failed.

An investigation by The People-Sentinel has found multiple causes for Allendale’s nutrition crisis: the county’s population decline, the monopolization of the food industry and hundreds of thousands of dollars that Allendale’s congressional representatives have taken from food lobbyists.

Timeline of Allendale’s Grocer Decline

The decline of grocery stores in Allendale has ­occurred over multiple decades, concurrent to the county’s declining population.

Although IGA is a corporate chain, Allendale IGA is owned independently by Wayne Brown, who has worked in the community as a grocer for decades. Between 1994 and 2004, the store was a Piggly Wiggly owned by Brown’s father, Randy Brown. At that time, according to Brown, there was an IGA down the road that they competed with, and Gatlin’s IGA was open in Fairfax.

Then, in 2004, IGA approached Randy with an offer.

“[They] came to us and said, ‘Listen, if you would change over and start buying from us, we’ll make you the only grocery store in town,’” Brown said. “It was an offer we couldn’t turn down [because other­wise] we would’ve been out of business.”

Since the 2000s, multiple attempts have been made to open new grocery stores, all of which failed. In 2013, a new Piggly Wiggly closed after being open for only one year. Since then, Brown’s IGA on Route 278 became the last grocery store standing in Allendale County.

Different organizations and programs help connect residents to fresh food, such as the SmartBox Food Pantry and several other food pantries run by churches and local groups. Additionally, the county’s farmers market operates Thursday, Friday and Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. between April and October. However, the issue still remains: vast swaths of the county do not have access to a grocery store.

“There’s 400 something square miles in Allendale and you’re dealing with one grocery store,” said Michelle Altman, a ­Rural Health and Nutrition agent at Clemson University. “You have the two hubs of Fairfax and Allendale but there are a lot of rural areas and we do not have a public transportation system that is available.”

Ongoing Effects

The lack of accessibility to grocery stores has had deadly effects on the Town of Fairfax, and has been a barrier to the public health of Allendale County at large. According to Stacker, a data journalism publication, 34.1 percent of Allendale County children experience food insecurity, 18 percent higher than the national average and the highest rate in South Carolina.

Those who have lived in Allendale County for decades, like Owens, have witnessed the number of grocery stores dwindle down to the IGA that remains. Fortunately for Owens, his family members help him get access to food and he lives just a few blocks away from the IGA. However, many elderly residents of Fairfax struggle to get to the store, which is just over five miles from the town, and thus can only be accessed by wheels. Other places, like the small town of Sycamore and the rural areas of Allendale County are also far from the IGA.

“We’re living in a food desert,” said Smart, who runs Smart Box, a community non-profit located several blocks from the shell of Gatlin’s IGA that connects Fairfax’s elderly with fresh food. Smart is involved in a soup kitchen in Allendale and made access to nutrition a top issue while serving on Fairfax’s town council.

Smart said the elderly who cannot drive have been hit particularly hard by the town’s lack of a grocery store. Allendale, like many rural communities, lacks a consistent public transportation system.

“Fairfax houses most of your elderly folks, so [without a grocery store,] it’s hard for them to be able to find rides,” Smart said. “They gotta pay people sometimes up to $50 sometimes to give them a ride.”

Political & Demographic Changes

The tragic irony that residents of Allendale — a county with a deeply agricultural economy — struggle to get access to food does not exist without reason. The decline of grocery stores and food accessibility in Allendale is in part due to national changes in the grocery store industry that began in the 1980s, according to Pat Garofalo, Director of State and ­Local Policy at the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP). The AELP studies how lack of antitrust enforcement has negatively affected the American economy.

Garofalo said that since the 1980s, the judicial interpretation and enforcement of antitrust laws — which are meant to prevent businesses from turning into anti-competitive monopolies — has changed and allowed for large mergers between grocery store chains to take place. Previously, during the time that community members like Owens were growing up, antitrust laws were enforced, making it easier for small grocery stores to stay open.

“When that happened, the same thing that happened to every other industry happened in the grocery industry: you saw a huge amount of consolidation,” Garofalo said. “Fast forward to today and a handful of corporations dominate.”

“[The lack of] grocery stores is part of the overall failure in antitrust enforcement, and what you see in a host of sectors is a ton of consolidation and a ton of communities left behind,” Garofalo said. “Money has been sucked out of local communities.”

Brown said being independent allows him to buy as much as possible locally, however, at the end of the day, corporate warehouses have larger supplies of food and other options are limited.

“The corporate side of things nowadays [has a] model that is not built on their stores,” Brown said. “Look at Walmart. Who can compete with them? They have their own buying power. They tell people what they’re going to pay for stuff. This world is becoming corporate and everybody can see it.”

All of Allendale County’s representatives in the United States Congress — Jim Clyburn, Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham — have taken thousands of dollars from large corporations within the food industry that have lobbied for consolidation. Scott and Graham did not respond to The People-Sentinel’s request for comment by press time.

In an email statement to The People-Sentinel, Clyburn said he has worked “to ensure WIC, SNAP, and other nutrition assistance programs are funded at proper levels.” Clyburn did not address The People-Sentinel’s question about the thousands of dollars he has taken from the food industry responsible for the closure of grocery stores.

“While there has been significant progress, there is still plenty of work to be done,” Clyburn said in the statement. “I’m committed to ensuring rural residents in the sixth district have the nutritional resources they need to not just survive but thrive.”

Over the years, small farms and small grocery stores like the ones that Owens remembers from his childhood have been made economically unfeasible.

The rapid population decline that has occurred in Allendale County since the early 2000s has also made it hard to attract new grocery stores, according to Brown. Between 2000 and 2021, the county’s population fell from 11,193 to 7,858, closing businesses throughout the county.

Local Revitalization Attempts

Talk of bringing back Gatlin’s IGA or starting a new grocery store for Fairfax has been around town for years. However, the building is in a state of disrepair, and the upfront costs just to get the store open are enough to scare away potential buyers or businesses, according to Brown.

Throughout the 2000s, several attempts were made to start new grocery stores within the county. However, anemic sales numbers made the efforts unsustainable.

Brown estimates that reopening a grocery store in Fairfax independently would cost hundreds of thousands of ­dollars in upfront costs, as the buildings in Fairfax that could support a grocery store are in need of repair. Startup costs and the lack of a sustainable population make it a bad investment, according to Brown. Additionally, the equipment that is needed to start a grocery store like industrial refrigerators, storage racks and construction equipment have all shot up in price due to the supply chain crisis.

Many states across the country have attempted to resolve the issue by appealing to grocers using tax breaks, offering cheaper land and using other incentives. However, Garofalo said these efforts often fail to create long-lasting solutions.

“That strategy has just failed time and time again to get grocery stores sustainably in these food deserts,” Garofalo said. “That policy response is based on just a completely incorrect understanding of how the retail market works, what corporate power is and what low-income communities actually need.”

In the absence of a long-term solution to the problem, food pantries and churches have been left to fill the void of nutrition access, according to Altman.

“The churches and civic organizations in Fairfax are stakeholder led, and its members of the community that are pushing it along,” Altman said. “But does it solve the issue? No, [and] that’s disheartening.”

Smart’s non-profit is currently working on organizing community leaders around starting a community run garden in spring of 2024 to reconnect Allendale to food systems. Additionally, Lewis has been instrumental in putting on Allendale’s weekly farmers market and this summer, hosted cooking classes for children. However, the deeper problem, community leaders say, remains unresolved.

“We have to get the right people, the right leaders that are not only passionate about making this happen, but compassionate,” Lewis said. “There are seniors that are in desperate need of this. There are children that are in desperate need of this.”