King Soopers the community centerpiece of south Boulder
Maybe there’s nothing too remarkable about the King Soopers on Table Mesa Drive in Boulder. There are chain stores in big shopping centers all over the place. Everybody gets their groceries somewhere.
But for thousands, this was — is — their store. They know the aisles and the workers. They expect to run into friends. Many have been shopping there for decades; next summer will mark the store’s 50th anniversary.
“You don’t realize how important it is until something like this happens, and then it’s like, ‘Oh my God, that’s where we always go,’ ” said JoAnn Schmohe, a shopper there since 1976. “It’s one of those things that seems mundane, but now it seems so special.”
Ordinary by any means up until Monday’s fatal shooting, this south Boulder King Soopers engenders particular affection. And regulars said it’s been an especially valuable place during the pandemic, when grocery stores became rare centers of human activity.
“This is not some place that people just walk in and out of,” Ginger Thom said. “It’s a home away from home for a lot of
people.”
Thom worked there shortly after it opened, a 20-year-old bagger with a crush on a young cashier named Frank. He was restocking milk one day when she asked him over for lasagna. He turned around to say yes and tripped over a pallet of milk.
They’ve been married almost 40 years.
“For us it’s personal,” said Thom, who now lives across town but goes “in there anytime we go hiking” in the area.
The store is well removed from Boulder’s other commercial centers, nestled along two of the city’s busiest streets and just below the foothills where the iconic Flatirons loom large over the parking lot. It’s surrounded by homes, many of which are working-class — an endangered type in a city where the average home price is more than $1 million. There are several schools nearby, a library, a federal scientific lab and a network of popular trails.
The King Soopers was not welcome at first. Fittingly in this city known for resistance to new development, the City Council for nearly a decade rejected plans for a large supermarket on Table Mesa Drive, citing concerns about the impact on the neighborhood.
King Soopers sued the city, and a judge ordered Boulder to rezone the site. The store opened in 1972, and was described in the Daily Camera at the time as the company’s “most elaborate” yet.
And unlike many forms of development in Boulder and in Colorado generally, the store has survived through the city’s evolution and is an enduring community hub.
“It’s almost a small-town feel there, which is odd to say given it’s a giant grocery store owned by a giant chain,” former Mayor Matt Appelbaum said. “There’s another King Soopers I go to more often, but the Table Mesa store does feel like much more of a community. It’s really very rare when I go in there that I don’t run into someone I know.”
Christine Chen has been running into people there since she was a little kid, when she ate free cookies from the bakery and rode the mechanical pony outside. She has lived all over the world. And when she moved back a couple years ago, she said, she chose south Boulder specifically because of the community.
“I think it just attracts such a cross section of people, young and old, all economic levels and income levels, all races, all gender expressions. You can walk into the King Soopers, and it’s like the most diverse place in Boulder in some ways,” Chen said.
Relative Boulder newcomer Madison Jarvis, a 23-year-old Connecticut native, said that on the “East Coast, we just had ‘the grocery store.’ It was on the corner, but there was nobody there I knew or recognized. This was different.”
The regulars know or at least recognize the employees, and vice versa, which was clear from customer Maya Key’s remembrance of longtime employee and shooting victim Teri Leiker: “She was someone I always appreciated for her kindness, her smile and total readiness to help.”
Countless mourners offered similar messages Wednesday outside of the fence set up along the sidewalk on Table Mesa Drive, investigators on the other side of the fence. Many laid flowers and cards, lit candles or signed pop-up memorials for the 10 people shot and killed some 48 hours prior. Some just stood there crying quietly.
Reed Glenn has gone to the King Soopers three or four times a week since the store first opened, and specifically recalled Denny Stong, the youngest of the victims and a King Soopers employee.
“He was just really sweet, nice, helpful,” Glenn said. “Some of the ones who died — I didn’t know them personally, but they helped me.”
She was there the day before the massacre, grabbing flowers and birdseed and some food. It’s important to her that the store reopens eventually. “It’s our lifeline,” she said. Through the tears, the loyalists were unanimous: They will return to the store when they can. It cannot become just the place where a gunman killed 10 people.
Mayor Sam Weaver told his constituents the same during a virtual town hall this week, calling it “a critical piece of that part of our town and our entire community, and I look forward to the day that we open that back up”
Shopping there again, Boulder resident Maizie Grace said, will be “hard and scary and sad, but it’s the right thing to do. It’s the most effective way to heal this wound.”
There is no shortage of other grocery stores in town. A new Whole Foods opened last month a couple hundred yards from the King Soopers.
But Boulderites aren’t prepared to surrender this particular store and all it has represented for decades.
“Our community,” Appelbaum said, “like other places where this has happened, is made up of real people who go about their lives, who tend to really like the place they live in. We’re going to get back to that. We have to get back to that.”