What happened???

On September 17, employees and customers in Tops got the word that the store would close for good in two weeks. Doors will shutter at 3:00 p.m. on Friday, October 2. By the time this paper is in your hand, that’ll be one week.

Sentiment around the village was quick and fierce. Some blamed others for not supporting the store and shopping instead at cheaper alternatives, some blamed the store itself for not having prices low enough for the area, and some blamed Walmart just down the road for notching another business on its kill list.

From where we sit, prices were a tremendous problem, and so was the quality of some of the goods. There was a clear sense that they were cheaping out on some stuff to stay afloat. You can blame Walmart for this, as we wrote about when ShopRite closed two years earlier, and you can blame the larger economy for this as we can all barely afford to blink these days.

But, despite all that, there’s something just incredibly galling about how all of this was handled by the supermarket chain. It starts with the press release.

“Despite numerous efforts to energize and reinvigorate the store, the location consistently struggled to attract the customer volume necessary to sustain operations,” the store said. We think “reinvigorate” is a misleading word. So is a phrase later on, when the company president discusses the store’s “prolonged underperformance.” Tops was here for a year, any work they did would be just plain “invigorating,” because there was no time for them to try anything new. Their underperformance, by definition, can’t be called “prolonged.”

What efforts? What attempts to energize? Tops was a welcome presence in the village but a distant one. We’re not clear on what you do to “energize” a grocery store but whatever it is, we never saw them do it. Speaking from our end, they didn’t even advertise or offer coupons in the paper.

It bothers us because they are framing it like they had been valiantly trying new things over and over until they had exhausted their options, like it’s the fault of the village for not gathering for them. That is not what happened. It’s much closer to that old line in The Simpsons, “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.”

Our outrage here is not so much about the fact that they couldn’t make it work in Ellenville. It’s that a $2.6 billion dollar company showed up at all in an environment that was so inappropriate they couldn’t even last a year. Supermarket leases are typically ten years long. How did they sign a commitment like that only to flame out from, literally, day one? This is a major corporation, not a pick-up basketball game. They bought into an economically depressed area in the middle of an economic depression – if they weren’t the business to carry that kind of risk and wait for things to improve, why did they put us through all of this in the first place? What kind of due diligence was there?

The press release concluded by assuring us that Tops “remains committed to serving the region from its locations in New Paltz and Rhinebeck.” If they didn’t know Ellenville wasn’t Rhinebeck, what were they doing here at all?

ShopRite lasted about thirty years in that location. They gave ten months’ notice before they left, allowing the village and the landlord time to get a plan together for the plaza and the empty store.

Tops? Well, they gave two weeks’ notice. It would be considered a professional courtesy if a cashier gave that time, so that the store could flex shifts and find someone to cover the aisle. There’s no flexing shifts here. There’s no stack of resumes to go through. Two weeks for a business of this scale, one that has businesses right next door that need an anchor, one that’s walking distance from a senior housing facility, is a cruel thing to have done. It’s cruel to customers and it’s cruel to the staff, who find themselves flung over the mountain to New Paltz or across the river to Rhinebeck. It feels like those old stories where the circus packs up and leaves town overnight.

When we heard the news, your editor commented that the village should look into opening a co-op. The newsroom was split on the idea, but suddenly we’re hearing it more and more. It’s being talked about in comments on our website and from people on the street. I wasn’t entirely serious when I tossed idea out, but maybe I should have been.

If a supermarket can’t make it here, maybe it’s time to change the financial structure to something that can.