OSAWATOMIE, Kan. _ A slight echo carries your footfalls as you walk the aisles of what used to be Moon's grocery store.
Some dry goods remain on the shelves, but most are bare. The coolers stand empty. No cars in the parking lot.
The last grocery store, the final place with a produce section for a city of 4,000, is no more. And may never be again.
"We're an endangered species," said Mike Moon, who ran the store for a quarter century. "It's a scary situation."
The troubles of running a small-town shop only grew more dire when the Walmart 7 miles away in Paola grew to include a full-blown grocery. Moon tried some things in response. Then he sold the business, while keeping the building, to somebody else who spiffed things up even more. It didn't work.
It's a story repeated across small towns in Kansas and rural America broadly. Grocery stores struggle to stay alive, even when there's not a Walmart nearby.
The food shops represent a longstanding trend of small towns. Like the farms that marked white settlement in the country's hinterlands, they've become fewer and larger. That consolidation doomed the mom-and-pop grocery the way it did the 300-acre grain farm and the small-herd livestock operation.
As the groceries close, their towns hear a final death knell, or at least the signal that things are only going down in the lonely years ahead. The disappearance of the grocery store _ more than an inconvenience to the elderly, the poor and those who don't drive _ speeds the plummet of home values and any other lingering retail activity.
Kansas is a prime example of what's happening elsewhere. From 2006 to 2010, according to a report on "The Rural Grocery Crisis," a fifth of the state's rural groceries shut down. The Center for Engagement and Community Development at Kansas State University recorded the loss of 43 of the 213 rural groceries since it started tracking them in 2007.
In Iowa, any town with less than 1,000 people is more likely than not to have lost its only grocery store since the mid-1990s.
Two out of every five Kansas counties include a food desert, an area at least 10 miles from the nearest grocery.
Even the prospect that the local grocery might shutter is enough to make the most vulnerable worry about putting together a week of meals.
