SAINT-MALO — The small town of Poilley in France’s western Brittany region suddenly got even smaller when its only grocery store closed at the end of 2022. For the mayor Noël Demazel, the minimart tabac, which also served as a bar and restaurant for the 400 inhabitants, was the economic and social heartbeat of Poilley — and without it was effectively “dead” as a town.
A year and a half later, after a long struggle, the town finally found someone to take over the business last April and breathe some new life into Poilley’s streets. Good news for the residents, but will it last? Will the town be able to keep the establishment afloat or prevent the new managers from leaving?
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This is an issue that countless rural municipalities are experiencing across France, from the southern Pyrénées to central Burgundy. According to government data, 62% of the country’s municipalities currently don’t have a single local store, compared with 25% in 1980.
From France to Québec
The story is always the same: the owner of a barely profitable store with multiple services that sells baguettes, cigarettes, stamps and sometimes serves hot food, decides to close up shop, triggering a long quest for town councils to find new managers. They fight hard to keep these places open, sometimes offering steeply discounted rent. An online platform was even created: on SOS Villages, mayors can post ads to attract people who might be interested in taking over the local business. The French government also launched a special program in 2023, which can dedicate up to 80,000 euros per project. In one year, more than 300 projects were financed.
It’s a phenomenon that is hardly exclusive to France. On the other side of the Atlantic, Québec’s Le Devoir recently featured a reportage in the village of Sainte-Edwidge-de-Clifton. There, inhabitants had to band together to keep the local convenience store open after its owner decided to retire after 28 years. According to the daily, the proportion of small towns without a “dépanneur” as it is called in Québec has doubled between 2006 and 2022 in the Canadian province. In the U.S., 76 counties nationwide are without a single grocery store, particularly in the Midwest and Great Plains. This has pushed several states to introduce dedicated bills to provide grants and loans for small grocers.
The spot to gather
From the 1990s to 2010, I spent nearly every summer at my maternal grandparents' in Saint-Aubin-sur-Loire, a village of about 300 inhabitants in rural Burgundy. They lived in a house next to the post office and two streets from a cafe-restaurant that also operated as a convenience store. In the 2000s, the post office was turned into a house and the owners of the store retired, triggering a never ending battle for the town council to keep it running. Today it is still open, but managers come and go, and a constant uncertainty looms as to whether it will last in the long run.
In our collective memories, these places are important for rural communities: in my grandparents’ quiet village, the cafe-restaurant-store felt like it had always been the only spot where residents could gather on neutral territory. These venues are also counted on to make certain services more accessible for the elderly in particular. For town councils, they are considered essential to attracting new residents, as rural populations keep decreasing every year and certain villages eventually become ghost towns. “Without a convenience store, it’s the beginning of the end. The village becomes a soulless dormitory [...]. Fewer families come. The school empties. Another part of the municipality leaves,” says the mayor of Québec’s Sainte-Edwidge-de-Clifton.
Local stores vs. big supermarkets
But if we feel these spaces’ roles are so essential, why then is it such a battle to keep them open? Especially since it felt like the COVID-19 pandemic had ushered in a renewed desire to head for the countryside, and to be “more local.”
Part of the answer is that in France at least, these stores struggle to make money amid competition with big supermarkets and peripheral commercial areas, which still attract a lot of consumers despite a poor image. “At first there was a good start, but after the excitement of the opening, it all collapsed,” a French woman who took over a convenience store in central France told the business daily Les Echos. Just one year later, her dream turned into a nightmare and she had to close shop, losing 10,000 euros in savings. She blamed “the well-entrenched consumption habits of residents who’d rather do their shopping in cities rather than at the local store.”
The reality is that our consumption habits have changed in an increasingly globalized world. We now tend to favor supermarkets which offer more products for cheaper prices than local stores, and we are increasingly turning to online shopping platforms like Amazon for all kinds of deliveries.
I moved last year to a tiny hamlet in western Brittany, 3 kilometers away from the village center where there's a café, a post office, a boulangerie, a pharmacy and a small grocery store. But I rarely go there, except to buy a baguette or croissants from time to time. My partner or I hit the supermarket, just a 15-minute drive away, once a week, get everything we need and we’re done.
Fear of a disconnected future
Even though I chose a rural environment to buy my first house, just like my grandparents, our realities couldn’t be any different. They knew (I think, literally) everyone in their village, where my grandfather would go to the cafe to speak with friends and get the latest gossip. My partner and I don’t have the same connection with the people of our town, even though we’ve made a point to get to know our direct neighbors.
Technology gives the illusion that we live in a hyperconnected world, even as we grow more isolated from the people around us. Is that spirit of tight-knit communities bound to vanish altogether? Is the battle to save these local stores some kind of expression of nostalgia of the past, or fear of a disconnected future?
As we promote the local and circular economy to fight against climate change and criticize globalization and overconsumption, maybe these small stores are calling us not just to fight for their existence, but to actually make them a regular habit again.
Another clear memory from my grandparents’ rural lives was their magnificent vegetable garden. It’s something I’ve been planning on having as part of my new life in the countryside, as a way to be more self-sufficient and environmentally conscious. Still, I know we can’t provide for all we need, nor would we want to. It would be just perfect if I could find the rest in the village store.