International Marketplace Point Roberts, WA

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Re: International Marketplace Point Roberts, WA

Post by storewanderer »

SamSpade wrote: June 25th, 2021, 6:13 pm Sad update on the continued downhill slide of the situation here:
Food crisis feared on Washington peninsula isolated by border as only grocery teeters on closure

Hopefully more media attention will somehow assist this business out. :(
I don't really know how this town can even remain without the grocery store... the people who live in Point Roberts cannot exactly easily just drive over the border and back into WA at Blaine to grocery shop. People from Point Roberts have a very hard time getting over the border and back into WA at Blaine to go to a doctor's appointment...

I am disappointed but not surprised Washington has not done more to assist businesses with lost revenue during this period. Many states did not do much, thousands of businesses have probably already closed throughout the state, but this is a very extraordinary situation with this large grocery store in Point Roberts.

There was Federal COVID Relief Money available then allocated to the states to be spent at the discretion of the states, and one thing the states could do was to assist small businesses with lost revenue. I don't want to go to politics here but based on what happened here, if this business had been in, say, South Dakota, they would have almost certainly received $500,000 of that Federal COVID Relief Money twice out of the South Dakota Small Business Aid Program... (there were 2 rounds) which would have covered quite a few months expenses at $30,000 a month...

The above program was in addition to Paycheck Protection Program (assuming loss of revenue was so much that the PPP did not cover it- which in the case of this store I'm sure it didn't).
This store got two rounds of Paycheck Protection Program funds and got almost $300k total through that. So that helped them for at best 10 months. The store has been cut off now for about 15 months so they certainly tried to weather this mess.
https://www.federalpay.org/paycheck-pro ... roberts-wa

Again not wanting to go into politics here but really wondering if the way this border crossing is being handled and this problem basically being ignored despite constant pleas from the residents of the Point Roberts for over a year now, is a tactic to literally bleed the situation out and just get Point Roberts officially transferred to Canada.
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Re: International Marketplace Point Roberts, WA

Post by veteran+ »

NO one knows, without a doubt, what really happened in this situation, however unfortunate.

I am sure it is complicated with history that predates COVID.

Comparing S. Dakota and Washington is not germane.

I hope something is done for the residents and ALL residents of food desert situations.
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Re: International Marketplace Point Roberts, WA

Post by storewanderer »

veteran+ wrote: June 26th, 2021, 9:42 am NO one knows, without a doubt, what really happened in this situation, however unfortunate.

I am sure it is complicated with history that predates COVID.

Comparing S. Dakota and Washington is not germane.

I hope something is done for the residents and ALL residents of food desert situations.
Well you know grocery stores well enough to know that an area with a population of 1,000 people and almost nobody coming in/out cannot easily support a 40k square foot grocery store... so that is the situation. I think the store was open 10-7 so you have 63 hours a week to staff the thing. If it had 10 employees and all full time, the payroll cost factoring in the benefits etc. is probably about $12k a week plus other expenses.

The same bucket of federal money was available to allocate out to WA as was allocated in SD. There is no guarantee this business would have qualified for the SD funding and WA had it gone that route may have had different terms for its program so again no guarantee the business would have qualified.

This is not really the same as the generic food desert. In a food desert people can generally... get to food... if they go another couple miles, and they are free to do that if they can arrange transportation. Most food deserts are also in areas with fairly robust public transportation so that is an option- yes it is inconvenient. In this case, if this store closes and the border rules are not changed, these people, literally will not be able to get to food even with their private transportation due to the border restrictions. Also it is a bit excessive to deal with border agents 4 times to get to a grocery store. You can paint it as the same picture as a food desert but it is definitely an extremely bad situation. There was a sea ferry going between this town and Bellingham once a week, not sure if that is happening anymore, so the public transportation is very limited. You can't just drive across the borders right now due to COVID...
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Re: International Marketplace Point Roberts, WA

Post by veteran+ »

Great points!

I was not characterizing this place as a food desert.

I hope they get help.

Side note: Why would any entity (community, financial backers, local government, etc.) support and approve such a large store for such a small community?
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Re: International Marketplace Point Roberts, WA

Post by storewanderer »

veteran+ wrote: June 27th, 2021, 8:24 am Great points!

I was not characterizing this place as a food desert.

I hope they get help.

Side note: Why would any entity (community, financial backers, local government, etc.) support and approve such a large store for such a small community?
There was a good bit of cross border traffic in this location for what could be called many of the wrong reasons. Point Roberts has a lot of shipping services- basically people from Canada order items from US websites and get them shipped to these shipping services in Point Roberts and drive down there to pick them up, either so they can buy from websites that won't ship to Canada or because it is cheaper to do this.

Also gas is popular in Point Roberts. Again this is primarily with Canadian customers. There are 5 gas stations with an unusually large number of gas pumps for this population. Gas is much cheaper there in Point Roberts than in Canada. The gas stations there display the price in litres despite being in the US. When I was there, aside from the Shell which did present the price in gallons on the pump/receipt, the other gas stations there (at the time- two unbranded, a Chevron, and a Mobil) even presented the receipt and the pump display in litres.

The grocery store was getting drive-in traffic from Canada in conjunction with the above two activities. Certain items (especially dairy items) tend to cost a lot less in the US than Canada. In some cases it is simply people who are looking for different brands of items may be interested in buying from a US Store. There are some restrictions on what can be taken over the border back into Canada (certain meat, liquor, and produce items could be prohibited). I still don't know the history of this store- it looks like it may have been part of a chain at some point (possibly the old Brown & Cole group). It also looks like it was expanded at some point.

So considering the above I think there may be bigger reasons why certain powers to be want this town to be for lack of better words, bled out, cut off, etc.

If this were to become a part of Canada, would the large grocery store still be viable? That I am not sure. There is a Save-On Foods (former Safeway- standard 00's Lifestyle store- big and with lots to offer) and a rather nice looking (but still lousy offerings) Thrifty Foods about 2 miles away into Canada.
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Re: International Marketplace Point Roberts, WA

Post by veteran+ »

I see and interesting.

Well, I guess "opportunistic" retailing does not hold up long term.

That artificial demographic should have been considered with alternate strategies.

Unfortunate situation for the locals.
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Re: International Marketplace Point Roberts, WA

Post by Romr123 »

Same thing was seen in border areas in Michigan, particularly Port Huron/Sarnia where the retail sector in PH was far in excess of what was sustainable from just the US side...believe that in the day there were 2 Meijer, 2 Super KMart, 1 WalMart and a mall with Macys/Sears/JCPenney, plus a full helping of other big box. With Sarnia being reasonably wealthy (petrochemical/chemical processing) right over the bridge and London, ON (hub of western Ontario) being only about 100 kms away, there was a good bit of cross-border shopping occurring which didn't warrant the 45 more minute drive to metro Detroit.
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Re: International Marketplace Point Roberts, WA

Post by Brian Lutz »

https://www.governor.wa.gov/news-media/ ... s-business

Governor Jay Inslee has approved $100,000 from the state Strategic Reserve Fund to keep this store afloat.
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Re: International Marketplace Point Roberts, WA

Post by kr.abs.swy »

This one bothers me. This is a business that exists primarily to support tax avoidance on the part of Canadians, with a secondary benefit of serving a small community with a much larger grocery store than they would otherwise have. They aren't doing anything illegal (who is to say if the person buying a gallon of milk is from Tsawwassen or Point Roberts) but they clearly knew their business plan was based on people crossing the border. I wish them well, but I don't think they deserve a special bailout. They knew what they were getting into.
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Re: International Marketplace Point Roberts, WA

Post by BillyGr »

The cross border thing is common many places - we used to see it in NY state. It tended to vary somewhat based on the current values of money on both sides.
Another chain in Maine (Mardens - they do closeouts) you see lots of posts on their page from those who have missed shopping there for months now.

But in this particular situation, it seems the issue is more than just keeping the business alive, rather it is being sure that those who actually live there have some way to get items they need on a regular basis.

Perhaps supporting the store isn't the best option - maybe it would be better to design a service that everyone orders what they need and once a week they meet a truck in a central location and pick up their items?
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