You have two choices for groceries in Lander at Safeway and Mr. D’s. In Riverton, it’s Smith’s and a big box store north of the city. Dotting both communities are convenience stores and a mushroom-like growth of Dollar Stores. This reflects a national trend of local grocery stores being pushed out by national, and sometimes, international chains.
In a growing number of urban neighborhoods, there are no grocery stores, just Dollar stores with limited produce, no meat, milk, or eggs, and a preponderance of canned and dry goods.
It wasn’t always this way.
In Riverton, the first grocery store opened in the fall of 1906, with the Hays General Store. Since that seminal event 118 years ago, there have been dozens of grocery stores rising and falling across Fremont County.
The first true grocery store, one dedicated to fresh produce, meat, and dry goods, without the trappings of a general store arrived in Riverton, in 1929.
Safeway opened in 1915 in American Falls, Idaho. M.B. Skaggs purchased a small grocery store from his father and, over the next 11 years, franchised his “Safeway” brand to 428 stores in 10 states.
Skaggs purchased the Selig chain of 322 stores, renamed them Safeway, and became the largest grocery retailer west of the Mississippi.
The name “Safeway” came with Skaggs’s policy of cash-and-carry transactions. Other grocery stores offered lines of credit as general stores had practiced since first arriving in the American West in the 1830s.
Skaggs believed the “safe way” for families to purchase groceries was to pay for them when they picked them up. That way, they couldn’t fall into debt.
This policy was the main reason Safeway grocery stores continued to thrive through the Great Depression when other stores had to close their doors when their customers were not able to pay off their lines of credit.
Skaggs was an innovator, introducing “sell by” dates on perishable items, and selling fruit, produce, and meat by the pound. Individual hanging scales next to the produce aisles, a scale at the meat counter, and eventually scales at the checkout counter were all innovations he brought to his retail grocery stores.
As the business grew, he added a fleet of trucks to supply his rapidly growing empire. Originally shipping on gravel highways, and questionable dirt roads, Safeway trucks were well adapted to the advancing asphalt highways of the 1930s and through the war years.
Riverton was a landmark store for the Safeway chain.
The first Safeway was located on Main Street, but soon moved to South Third West Street, across from the Gem Theater, in the present building north of CATS (Central Wyoming Center for Art, Technology & Science.)
From the 1930s when the store moved to Third Street, until the new location was built in the 1950s, customers had to diagonally park on Third Street, or walk from parking spots on Main or Washington Streets. The spots on Main and Third came with parking meters.
Skaggs was aware of parking problems at his stores, not just in Riverton but throughout the chain. His solution was yet another innovation in retailing.
He began to purchase large lots in the communities his stores served. He sold the original stores, built new ones, and added spacious parking lots, with the unheard offering of free parking.
Aside from the Monopoly game board, few places offered free parking.
The Safeway lot was the first of its kind in Riverton. It’s a ubiquitous practice today but it had to start somewhere.
Safeway prided itself on offering the freshest produce, a to-order meat counter, and dairy products that arrived every other day. They had a frozen food section that evolved with advancing technology. The original reach-in, open freezers, became upright freezers in the late 1960s, with easy open clear glass doors. That too, was an innovation in grocery shopping for Fremont County.
The store was a huge success in the growing town, but there were rivals. In the early years, it was the Hays General Store, but later rivals came with Pay-n-save in 1939, Bens Supermarket in 1946 and finally, Mr. D’s, owned by Bob Woodward in 1965. The grocery business from the late 1930s to the early 1970s was so lucrative that Ben’s and Mr. D’s had two stores each in Riverton.
The general stores began to fade from the scene in Riverton and Lander but remained across Fremont County in smaller communities with the Crowheart Store, Gardner’s Market, the Kinnear Store, the Basketeria, Midvale Store, Missouri Valley Store, and the anchor point of all commerce on the Bad Water and Nowood areas in Bill Ramage’s Lysite Store.
The smaller communities of Shoshoni, Hudson, and Dubois all had two or three full-service grocery stores, too.
A series of mergers, acquisitions, and purchases by investment groups changed the corporate outlook of the store chain. It eventually devolved into just another corporate entity, dedicated more to stockholders than to customers. Though loyal local employees kept the friendly nature of the Riverton store until its demise in 2017. You can still feel the community touch when you walk into the Safeway in Lander.
When it was under the direct control of M.B. Skaggs, the chain worked with local, and regional farmers and ranchers to supply the best locally grown produce and meat.
The Safeway Corporation had 30 manufacturing facilities in the United States and Canada, producing a wide variety of products with unique private labels. That had dozens of other manufacturers contracted to produce packaged food and spices with a Safeway brand label attached during special runs.
The largest of Safeway’s many proprietary brands remain Lucerne. Lucerne is a separate company, contracted by Safeway Inc. to produce a myriad of products.
If you were a Safeway customer in Riverton, remain one in Lander, or had the joy of shopping with your grandmother back in the day, you probably recall these iconic brands.
Lucerne milk, butter, cheese, eggs, and especially ice cream. Kitchen Craft flour, sugar, and brown sugar. Town House baked beans, peas, soup, corn, or spaghetti. They made anything you could think of in canned goods.
Who could forget Busy Baker Cookies? Either fresh or in chilled tubes waiting for the stove at grandma’s house?
Nu-Made mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup, relish, peanut butter and many kids’ favorite, marshmallow cream in a jar.
Cragmont soda was the generic answer to higher-priced Coke, Pepsi, and Mountain Dew. The lemon-lime soda was a direct knockoff of Seven-Up. It cured many upset stomachs in Baby Boomers and Gen X before the preponderance of pharmaceutical solutions arrived. At 79 cents a six-pack in 1974, who could ask for more?
The Riverton Review published a comprehensive 35th Anniversary Edition in 1941, celebrating not only Riverton, but neighboring communities as well. Safeway was a big part of it.
Safeway Advertisement May 1941, Riverton Review
“As a concern which started in Idaho 26 years ago and which has served Wyoming for more than two decades, we have bent our efforts to bring a greater prosperity to Wyoming. In developing the most efficient distribution system we have been able to get Wyoming crops to market more speedily and more economically…so that the producer received a greater price for his products and the consumer, in turn, paid less. Through this system of distribution to hundreds of points in outside states go the lamb, finest quality beef, pork, poultry, eggs, corn, peas, beans, potatoes, sugar, cheese and a hundred other items that are produced in Wyoming. And from the sale of these items there returns to Wyoming a greater revenue…a revenue that reflects itself in the purchasing power of every Wyoming citizen.”
Safeway was an integral part of the community, sponsoring softball and baseball teams, offering part-time jobs for teenagers and actively supporting Chamber of Commerce activities in Riverton as the uranium boom led to the greatest expanse in the city’s history.
On the corporate side of the ledger, the company was sold, resold, and purchased multiple times by outside investment groups. Corporate profits were the goal. Few of these takeovers benefited the local economies where the hundreds of franchises did business.
A pharmacy was added, staffed with professional pharmacists who knew their clients, and the physicians of the community well.
Nationally Safeway and parent company Albertson’s were doing well. Safeway remains a Fortune 100 Company on the New York Stock Exchange today.
That wasn’t true in Riverton.
The rise of unprosecuted shoplifting in Riverton cut into profits. The crime spree was so intense that the lucrative business began to lose money.
Though items were “flying off the shelves,” too many of them left the store hidden in thieves’ pockets.
Despite the shoplifting, the pharmacy remained a rock for the franchise.
Big box stores came to Riverton, beginning with K-Mart in the late 1970s, and then to Wal-Mart which began to put local stores of all types out of business.
K-Mart continued the tradition of business involvement with youth activities and the local community, but their rival ignored it.
In 2017, the Safeway Corporation decided to close the Riverton franchise.
Customers scrambled for a new grocery store, with many making the 50-mile round trip to Lander’s Safeway store.
The demise of the Safeway pharmacy coincided with diminished medical care in Riverton. What were once routine medical procedures offered locally, became helicopter flights to Casper.
With the hometown friendliness of the Safeway Pharmacy replaced by national chains such as Walgreens and Wal Mart, and regional franchises in Smith’s Pharmacy a void was created.
That void was filled by Pioneer Pharmacy on Main Street in Riverton. Sommer Pederson was a respected pharmacist at Safeway. She took her expertise to Pioneer Pharmacy when she and her husband Michael started the business in 2019, two years after Safeway closed its doors for good.
The heritage and tradition of small-town quality remains with Pederson and her staff.
After 88 years, Safeway in Riverton closed its doors forever, leaving a vacuum in the community. The red Safeway signs and letters came down, the building was repainted, remodeled and took on new life.
A regional agricultural supply store, Murdochs Ranch and Home Supply, moved into the recently closed Big R Store on East Sunset. After a brief stay at the Big R site, Murdochs renovated the Safeway Store and now resides at the corner of Federal and Pershing in the former Safeway building.
Safeway provided quality produce at fair prices for four generations, 88 years, as Riverton grew from a small agricultural community to one of the largest mining towns in Wyoming and then back to its agricultural roots.
The Safeway motto said it all:
“Anything you want from a store…and a little bit more.”