Few shoppers, no buyers in Fairfield

Outside Kelley’s Thrift in the tiny Palouse town of Fairfield, the street is so quiet you can hear the sky turn blue, which is soothing only if you’re not Magdalena Kelley.

Dressed well enough for Sunday church, with perfectly coifed hair and jeweled earrings, the matriarch of the town’s only grocery kneels before a modest selection of shampoo bottles and restocks the shelves, waiting for the motion detector at the front door to peep. Ten minutes go by without a sound.

“February is slow. People don’t have much money,” says Kelley, who still speaks with a Filipino accent nearly four decades after arriving in this community on State Route 27, about 22 miles south of Spokane Valley.

There’s a sign on the store’s front door announcing that hours have been cut back. And the slim inventory of perishable items gets right to the point: Business just isn’t what it used to be.

In fact, this business is for sale, with few takers. Locals, like Darlene Wernz, fear Magdalena and her husband, Rick, will retire and no one will take their place.

“The problem is people who work in Spokane stop and buy their food there before they come home,” says Wernz. “We’ve thought of covering whole storefronts with plastic and with a sign that says, ‘Gone. Gone. What would you do if you couldn’t shop here?’ “

Let us remember what gets kicked beneath the tires when we shop too much in town, warn Wernz and others: small-town character; stores like Kelley’s, where calling you by name doesn’t involve reading it off your check, and where good, local customers can still give an IOU for groceries if payday’s another week out.

The motion detector finally peeps as Melvin Bliesner makes his way to the beverage aisle for a case of barley pop. It’s a trip of less than 20 steps, and Bliesner’s back at the checkout counter almost before the cool draft from his entrance dissipates.

“How’s your mom?” Kelley asks. She truly cares. Were it raining, she might offer Bliesner a slicker so he could make it home dry.

Bliesner, smiling through a day’s worth of razor stubble, gives the full report. After checking out, he reiterates the sentiment that city shopping is taking its toll on Fairfield.

“I don’t like to go to Spokane, myself,” says Bliesner, who has frequented this market all of his 50 years.

The easy assumption would be that Fairfield is shrinking, though Bliesner and others say the population of Fairfield and the surrounding area is about 550, as large as it’s been in quite a while. It’s easy to blame newcomers, but practically everybody makes it to Spokane more than they used to.

Customer Greg Sprague remembers when a trip to town more than once a week wasn’t practical. The road was gravel and if the dust and vibration weren’t enough to keep you home, the time the journey took surely was. A car might travel all the way to Opportunity without getting the speedometer needle to stand up straight, though these days that needle tends to lean hard to the right. The trip can take less than 30 minutes.

“One woman said she’s been here seven years and didn’t know we had a downtown or a doctor,” Wernz says.

Wernz and roughly 35 other Fairfield residents are strategizing to keep their shops open. A few years ago, the town lost its only bar and its only restaurant. Closures like those would have most towns running for the high ground of the Post Office, hoping it, too, wouldn’t go under.

But Fairfield has much to hold onto. There’s a hardware store due west of Kelley’s. Owl Pharmacy is packed with five-and-dime merchandise right across the street. The town has a doctor’s office with regular hours on one end of Main Street, and four blocks west Schanzenbach Funeral Home anchors the intersection of Main and First Avenue, which doubles as State Route 27. There’s no rush getting between the two. Fairfield has a rest home on the hillside.

So long as the fields around town keep pushing up wheat and grass, there’s a bank that’s sure to be giving out loans to customers of the St. John Hardware and Implement Co., which has a lot full of bright red Case International Harvester equipment.

Wernz says the trick to giving Fairfield a strong pulse might be drawing outsiders to town, not for what it has to offer now, but something special – a niche – maybe organic beef sold exclusively at Kelley’s, or a nice lunch at the café space that now sits empty.

Just six miles north up State Route 27, there is a steady stream of gamblers turning left toward Idaho and the Coeur d’Alene Casino. If Fairfield could somehow keep that traffic driving south for just a few minutes longer, commerce in the community might amount to more than handing the same old dollar back and forth, back and forth.

“We have to get people to shop local first,” Wernz said. Then, they can work on marketing something to the outside world that only Fairfield has to offer.

If only they could bottle quiet blue sky. If only they could get fair market value for Magdalena Kelley’s smile.