Rachel Mills tossed a sweet pepper in the air, admiring it.
“Check out these monster peppers,” she said.
She was in the produce section of the Carrs Grocery in Anchorage’s Fairview neighborhood.
“I'm a short person, but I mean, this orange pepper is bigger than my hand!”
She’s been shopping at “The People’s Carrs” since she moved to Alaska in 2008. It’s the oldest Carrs in Anchorage, and a community hub for the Fairview neighborhood.
Mills said it feels like a small-town store in the middle of the city. She regularly chats with fellow shoppers, exchanging recommendations and tips. The pharmacist remembers her husband’s birthday. During the pandemic, managers special-ordered food for her hamster so she could get everything she needed in one place. And she knows the employees by name, like the man behind the deli counter.
“Hey Willie!” she waves to him. “I’m telling her about your chicken!”
She’s heard it’s the best fried chicken in town. She can’t confirm since she’s vegetarian, but she says she believes it. She’s seen the long lines of people waiting when it’s coming out hot.
But Willie won’t be frying chicken at the corner of 13th and Gambell for much longer. The store closes on May 10, just one month after an announcement from their corporate owner, Albertsons Companies. A representative from the company didn’t agree to an interview but said the decision to close the location wasn’t made lightly. She wrote that the store has been underperforming for years.
Mills is devastated by the news. She said the store feels like home.
“It hurts to know that a business can just close down and create a food desert, consciously,” she said.
The closest grocery store and pharmacy is less than a mile away but that’s still a long distance for people without vehicles. Fairview has the lowest car ownership in the city, according to a paper put out by the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2014.
Raymond Patterson Junior lives up the street and doesn’t own a car. He said it will be hard when the store closes.
“You have to ask people for rides and pay people gas money to get rides up there, because you don't have transportation,” he said. “If they ain't going up that way, you actually have to take a cab or something like that. And that's where it gets expensive.”
But he said it’s more than that. He’s been coming to this store since he was tiny, when his grandparents would bring him. He always begged them for chocolate milk. He said they got it for him - sometimes.
That nostalgia is shared by other shoppers too. Andres Guarderas grew up a couple blocks from the store. Now he often pops over from his job in midtown.
“It's just going to be terrible because of the memories,” he said. “More than anything, I think people have a special place in their heart for this store.”
Guarderas said he knows that people associate the store with the homelessness and drug use in the neighborhood. But he said, people from all walks of life shop at the store.
“It has the reputation of being the ghetto Carrs, but honestly, it's not,” he said.
He said while he knows he can’t speak for everyone, he’s never felt unsafe.
Allen Kemplen is vice chair of the Fairview Community Council and a resident since the early 90s. He said the neighborhood has one of the lowest median incomes in the city. But while the store may look a little rough from the outside, he says that’s not what’s inside the building.
“Inside the building is a beating heart of the Fairview neighborhood - kaboom, kaboom, kaboom. It’s healthy,” he said.
He’s angry about the closure. He said the company is making decisions based on numbers. But he said that doesn’t tell the whole story.
“They haven't experienced the goodness within those walls,” he said. “All they see are those little numbers on the spreadsheet.”
And he’s frustrated that the news came so fast. He said that if the corporation had given them more notice, perhaps they could have worked out a deal, maybe turned the store into a coop. Anything to keep the community institution alive. Instead, he said, in a couple weeks the building will be encased in chain link fencing and barbed wire.
“You're going to take a vibrant, beating heart of the neighborhood,” he said. “And within 30 days, you've turned it into an empty shell that looks like a prison.”
Kemplen said he’d like to have some kind of goodbye before the store closes, maybe a ceremony or something to honor longtime staff and share memories with community members. He said he’s trying to figure out how to make that happen.
