Rural Grocery Spotlight: Batson's Drug Store and Family Market (Howard, KS)

Julie Perkins is the pharmacist and owner of Batson’s Drug Store and Family Market in Howard, Kansas (pop. 516). She purchased the store when it was solely a pharmacy in 1995. At that time, there were two grocery stores in town. After the last grocery store went out of business in 2004, Julie and her husband Patrick added onto the pharmacy and opened the grocery store in 2006. The store also has a soda fountain that has been in the building since the 1920s. Read highlights below from our conversation with Julie (which has been edited for length) conducted when we visited the store.

 

How would you describe the role your store plays in the community?

We're the only pharmacy and the only grocery store in the whole county. We’re needed here. It would be a 35- to 45-minute drive in any direction to get to another pharmacy or grocery store.

What is your store most known for in the community?

We’re a pillar of the community. We have fresh meat and a full-time meat cutter. The soda fountain has been here in this building since the ‘20s. The ceiling is a 1910s ceiling. I’d say we’re consistent. We have always been here. The pharmacy’s been here since the ‘50s or ‘60s.

Is that where the name Batson’s comes from?

It was the original owner. Everybody knew Batson’s as Batson’s so I just kept it as that. And then Family Market, we picked that name because with our supplier, “Our Family” is the generic line there. Trying to get families to shop here was my mentality in picking that name.

Can you talk about special events or community initiatives you participate in or help support?

The big one that we do is the Halloween hot dog roast. It started out as the barber here in town, who's passed away now, decided that first year that I moved back here that he wanted to do a hot dog roast out in the middle intersection. So, we brought in a big tub, put sand in it, and had a big bonfire. The people came with sticks where they would roast their marshmallows. And it's just grown over the years. Now we cook it on a grill. We serve 380 hot dogs every year. The community comes out, everybody in their Halloween costumes, and they have trunk or treat downtown, and it's really fun. That's our big event that we put on every year. But we also help 4-H and the after prom and all those organizations. We give them good pricing on meat if they're going to have a steak event, like 4-H does. When you're in a small town, you're donating to everything but we give a big donation to the after prom of some of our items off the shelves so that they can auction those off. Those are our big ones.

Do you have any popular or unique products that your customers rave about?

The soda fountain. I personally make homemade waffle cones and they're so good. People really like those. Our meat department has specials, like when we have three-day meat sales or when our grocery wholesaler runs meat sales, we sell by the loin, and we sell a ton of those. People come from all over Wichita and all surrounding towns when they know we're going to run one of those. We just put it on Facebook and people come out of the woodwork when we do those. It's not a huge moneymaker but it gets people in.

What are the biggest challenges your store faces on a day-to-day basis?

Right now, cooling and freezers and keeping those running. I mean, we're a long way away from anybody that can fix anything. There's not anybody local that can work on coolers, air conditioning, or that stuff. That's a big, big, big thing. We also have a dying population. I know that is small towns everywhere. But it’s hard to make things continue to stay in business if you have fewer clientele.

How has the rise of big box stores and dollar stores impacted your business?

When I heard that a dollar store was coming to town, I increased my fresh meat section and then I expanded my produce because at that time they weren't doing those. They're kind of inching into that now, but I increased that so it helped stabilize it a little bit. The biggest thing that I can think about is we used to have an ad that we would order in so much back-to-school stuff. We made sure we had everything on the back-to-school list that they would need here at our school district and we'd sell a ton of that and now, you barely even know that it's back-to-school time. We sell very, very little back-to-school stuff at all.

How do you deal with rising costs for products and supplies?

For one, we decreased to one truck a week to save on freight which is great because freight's less, but we do run into where if they shorted us on one truck then we're not going to get it for two weeks. So, there are some disadvantages and we've just started that so we’re experimenting with whether that's logical or not. Then we also cut back. If we had three different brands of cream cheese, maybe we didn’t need to carry all three, so we got rid of some of those.

What kinds of innovations or strategies have you tried to improve your business and were any of them successful?

Something's working. I don’t know. We just keep going. It's not easy by any means. It's hard, but we added fresh plants, which come through our grocery company, so it wasn't really hard to add that. They also have fresh-cut flowers. We added that after our local florist went out of business. As a business goes out, we add to it. We do fresh-cut flowers at Valentine's Day and Mother's Day when we know people will be buying fresh flowers. We recently added daily lunch specials. We added UPS shipping. I don't know if it's made an impact on sales, but it does get people into the store. And those three-day meat sales that we do, the whole loins, those have been very effective, too.

Have you made any recent improvements or upgrades to your store that you're really excited about?

We got a used proofer from another business here in town that wasn't using it anymore so we proof our own bread and cook it here. It smells so good. We do that usually once or twice a week. People have seemed to like it a lot. And we love our plants.

What advice would you give to others, especially those who are just starting out, based on your experience?

You have to really want to do it. It's not easy. You can't be a quitter. You're never going to be rich. I do it because it provides a huge service to the community. We have a great school, but if we closed, it would be detrimental to this whole community. You have to want to do it. Every little detail is important. How you buy, how you sell, everything is important.

In your opinion, what key changes or support systems are needed, at any level, to help make grocery stores more sustainable in the long term?

The buying power that the big stores have is just... I mean, my cost is higher than what they're selling it for out there. So to even the playing field would be amazing.

Is there anything else you'd like to share about your store, your pharmacy, and the community you serve?

We do a lot of stuff I think that people don't realize we do, like we change watch batteries for people. There’s no charge, you just buy the battery here. Our batteries are usually under $2 and we put that in for people. I do hearing tests and we sell hearing aids. We free gift wrap for anybody that buys any purchase here. We ship UPS. We have fresh flower arrangements on Mother's Day and Valentine's Day. We do daily deliveries to Moline and weekly deliveries to Longton and Elk Falls. We bake fresh bread once or twice a week. It’s neat when people that aren’t from here come in and they look around and you hear them say: “Oh my gosh, they have everything!”

 

 

 

 

 

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