Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 87. Sunrise is 5:44 and sunset is 8:17 for 14 hours 33 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning gibbous with 99 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 2003, in Mexico, the last ‘old-style’ Volkswagen Beetle rolls off the assembly line.
And so, and so: there’s an announcement on Facebook from Whitewater’s grocery cooperative, Whitewater Grocery Co., about a meeting to consider that organization’s future. I am not a member of that cooperative, and I’ll leave its members to consider their future. It’s enough to know that Whitewater’s options are broader than when the cooperative began, and have been for a few years.
One should consider our market for markets, so to speak, in two periods: 2016 to 2024, and 2024 to the present.
2016 to 2024. Whitewater once had a Daniels Sentry grocery, but that location closed at the end of 2015. That closure left Whitewater in 2016 without a large, standalone grocery. (Whitewater in 2015 also had a smaller grocery, Tienda y Taqueria La Preferida, and has since added a second small grocery, Guanajuato Produce. While these smaller groceries are not designed to provide a comprehensive selection of items, their particular selection is of great benefit to consumers in the city. We are better off for their presence.)
For years, the old Community Development Authority tried (fumbled, truly) and produced no replacement grocery for this city. No replacement is synonymous with nothing, utterly nothing. Some of the members of that old CDA were mere poseurs, with big talk that brought small results. (When I would write about ‘development men‘ back then, it was with derision, because they didn’t know what the fork they were doing. Inheriting a student-rental business is a poor substitute for reading and considering development thoroughly. And look, and look — these tired gentlemen want to accuse others. Yet the most meaningful accusation is that they, themselves, failed then and again in public policy outside their core business.)
2024 to the present. Under a new municipal administration, with a team that does, in fact, understand development, we soon saw an ALDI open in the city in 2024. See Corey Moen, ALDI Opens First Store in Whitewater, FOX 47, September 5, 2024. Well done. (Predictably, the old CDA men tried to claim credit for this achievement. See FREE WHITEWATER, Six Points on a Supermarket in Whitewater, September 23, 2024.)
It’s also possible that Whitewater will soon have a second grocery on the east side of town. Whitewater should pursue this opportunity. See FREE WHITEWATER, A Sensible Step Toward More Grocery and Childcare Options, June 16, 2026. (There are obvious practical differences, including regulatory differences, between opening a grocery and opening a childcare facility. Needless to say, today’s post only addresses grocery stores.)
Where does that leave the cooperative? I’d say expanded options since 2024 leave a cooperative no longer necessary. (Expanded options: well done, city administration.) What the members of the Whitewater Grocery Co. decide, is however, sensibly out of everyone else’s hands.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Town in Virginia celebrates its 101st pony swim: