They were once the icons of small-town America. Now they are as rare as bandshells in a city park. They are the small corner grocery store embedded in a residential block, off the main drag, and surrounded by homes.
A US Dept. of Commerce study says that the presence of such stores has plummeted 90% in the last 50 years. One of them is right here in the Soo – Baldwin’s Superette on the city’s east side at the corner of Swinton St. and Adams Ave.
“Sault Ste. Marie had at least ten stores like mine 25 years ago,” said Becky Akins-Meicher, who has owned Baldwin’s for 25 years. “You can rattle them off – Aunt Marion’s, Bungalow Bill’s, Horner’s Corner – as milestones in the city’s history.”
Akins-Meicher figures that her store was built at the turn of the last century, with the original family running it as a Northland Grocery well into the 1960s. The superette got its current name when the Baldwin family picked it up and made it an independent grocery in the mid-60s.
“I started working here in the 1990s while I was going to university,” said Aikens-Meicher, who ended up earning a biology degree from Lake State and meeting her first husband through the store.
“We bought the store from his family in 1997,” she said. “We lived upstairs where all the store owners had lived and where we started a family ourselves with two children.”
Akins-Meicher became full owner of Baldwin’s in 2010. Now she rents the upstairs to outside tenants and lives across the street on Adams with her family.
“The people are the most enjoyable part of owning a grocery,” she said. “Outside of my family, I’m closest to my customers. I see regulars all day long. My favorites come in during mornings on a routine, mostly my newspaper customers.”
Baldwin’s doesn’t close for holidays, even over Christmas.
“We are open for our regulars, many of whom are senior citizens who don’t drive anymore and see us as a family as well,” she says. “Business is good, but we never hit it out of the park. If someone moves on, a new customer always appears. I describe traffic as comfortably steady.”
For her, that translates into 300 customers a day, with 20% coming in four times a day. Aside from a rather diverse selection of liquor, the inventory goes beyond party store-fare into a selection of staples (think eggs and milk) to save regulars a car trip to the supermarket or box store.
“People outside of a four-block radius don’t even know we’re here,” said Akins-Meicher. “Our area has lots of rentals, so we see many college students. This year we’ve seen a lot of kids. A lot of young families are moving into the neighborhood, especially over the last five years.”
So, after almost three decades in the corner grocery business, what advice would she offer her younger self?
“I worried too much,” she said. “I’ve learned nothing is so catastrophic that we can’t fix it. We had a fire in 1999 and shut down for months. Nothing is the end of the world now.”
Update: An earlier version of this story said Akins-Meicher had listed her store for sale. She has changed her mind and the business is off the market.
