How a Local Supermarket Is Surviving the Walmart Era

Turns out, connecting with a community IRL still makes a difference

You’d probably drive right past Horton’s Supermarket if you weren’t looking for it — and, honestly, why would you be?

It’s in a small, squat, not exactly gorgeous building plonked down just inside the city limits of a small town in the mountains of rural southwest Virginia. There’s often a car or pickup truck in every spot, and when you go through the front door, past the community bulletin board, you’ll walk smack into a wall of assorted Little Debbie cakes, located across the aisle from many loaves of white bread and zero loaves of pumpernickel or rye, around the corner from several locally milled brands of cornmeal and flour. The truckload meat sale (neither grass-fed nor organic), which takes place twice a year, is an extremely big deal.

Horton’s is not for everyone, nor is it trying to be. Which may be the reason it still exists. But more on that later.

In today’s grocery-store landscape, Horton’s feels like a bit of a miracle: the kind of place you take for granted until you turn around and it’s a boarded-up eyesore in the middle of town. Like the Piggly Wiggly in Clay, West Virginia, which closed in 2015, reopened four months later as an independent IGA, then…