Grocer flattens prices, stocks up
Alaska business owner also raises worker wages Courtney Crowder
To get a gallon of milk to southeastern Alaska, grocer Max Rule first has to know he’s going to need it about two weeks ahead of time.
When his creamy clairvoyance decides he does, he places an order with a wholesale company, which ensures the milk is plucked off a shelf, packed onto a truck with the rest of Rule’s groceries and driven to a port in Seattle. There, the milk, now inside a 45-foot semi-trailer, is loaded onto a barge and towed by a tug boat up the West Coast and around the boundary islands of British Columbia, making stops in other remote Alaskan areas before pulling into Sitka’s dock on either Monday or Wednesday.
In the final leg of the milk’s adventure, the full trailer is placed on a chassis, motored to Rule’s store, unpacked and put on a shelf – primed and ready for a lucky Alaskan’s bowl of Cheerios.
An island where the only routes on and off involve a plane or a boat, this is the odyssey most items take to Sitka, says Rule, president and chief financial officer of a small corporation that operates multiple grocery stores.
“That’s how cars get here,” he says. “It’s how building materials get here. In fact, there was an ambulance on the barge yesterday, so we must be getting a new ambulance.”
While most grocery stores receive deliveries at least daily, Sitka is bound to the barge, completely dependent on the supply chain staying intact. Any hitch in the system and the effects ripple outward, resulting in an empty Alaskan plate – or dry bowl of cereal.
So when coronavirus began its slow seep into the Last Frontier, Rule found himself with the weight of an island’s worth of empty bellies on his shoulders. Feeling that responsibility deep in his bones, Rule worked through most nights to keep items stocked and customers content, bucking the bare shelves and panic-buying frenzy that plagued the Lower 48.
Through his sleeplessness, Rule, a self-identified by-the-book-kind of guy, learned to trust his gut, to believe his innate moral compass would guide him toward the right thing to do.
For a place like Sitka, where spring winds blow in summer tourists whose spending helps sustain the economy through cold, hard winters, coronavirus’ impacts will be felt for a long time, with most in-season cruises canceled.
The future, much like the pandemic present, feels “cloudy” and “uncertain,” Rule says.
Detecting his community’s uncomfortable unmooring, Rule decided early on in COVID-19’S spread that his stores, including the crown jewel, Sea Mart, would continue operating as they always had – just with the social distancing, cleaning, relaxed leave and masks that have become de rigueur in this era.
“In times of crisis, whether it’s a death in the family, loss of a job, a good, solid pandemic – which we’ve never experienced before – I think people want
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something they can count on,” Rule says.
The cost of eating in Alaska
As a child in Montana, Rule found stability in the unemotional simplicity of numbers.
He started shoveling snow and mowing lawns as soon as he turned double digits and immediately made it into a business, complete with standing appointments and a little invoice book he carried in his pocket to bill customers – officially, of course.
Since those early shovel-wielding days, Rule has always had a job, working his way through high school and college and knowing intimately what it meant to scrimp and save.
Alaska first captured Rule’s imagination after his father and a buddy flew a single-engine airplane to Ketchikan in the mid-’70s, bringing back as many stories as they did fish.
“This probably sounds really corny, but I remember as a small child sitting there, flipping through these pictures,” says Rule. Mesmerized by the landscape, a part of him believed he was meant for Alaska.
He came to the 49th state, business and accounting degree in hand, in 1985, landing in Sitka as the Hames Corp.’s CFO about two decades later. In 2016, he became the first non-family member, non-owner to head up the four-generations deep company.
Throughout Rule’s tenure, the price of groceries has been a contentious issue, and, for a numbers guy, it’s a balancing act between keeping costs low and staying in business – a razor’s edge that got even sharper during the pandemic.
Right around Easter, the cost of eggs “just absolutely skyrocketed,” Rule says. Beef and other proteins spiked soon after and groceries, in general, have followed suit in recent weeks.
With crushing unemployment numbers all over the news and the summer season’s cancellation, Rule knew his customers would be hurting and that this would be another expense for them to fret. Even as he posted signs telling shoppers retail prices may fluctuate, he checked his gut.
The company would keep prices level,