The drill area of the Funston Memorial Armory, 1021 N. State, will be transformed into a commissary similar to those on large military installations for nine hours on Aug. 7.
Grocery items will be brought from the commissary at Fort Leavenworth and put up for purchase by active and retired military personnel. Prices for commissary items are 25 to 50 percent below retail.
Sgt. Brian Blandamer, 891st Engineer Battalion guardsman arranging the visit, stressed that only those who have military identification cards, including dependents, would be permitted to participate.
Those eligible to have a card but who do not may obtain one at the local armory any time, including Aug. 7.
“This hasn’t been done in southeast Kansas before and if successful it likely will be again, at least once a year,” Blandamer said.
If the commissary visits become an annual event, pre-orders may become part of the purchasing process, he said. Information about available products may be found at www.commissaries.com.
The Defense Commissary Agency is an arm of the U.S. Department of Defense that manages grocery stores on U.S. military installations worldwide.
The stores function much the same as a typical civilian supermarket. Goods are sold at cost, plus a 5 percent surcharge to pay for building new commissaries, maintenance and operations.
AUG. 7 is a part of a drill weekend, which means about 100 891st Battalion soldiers will be in Iola. In addition to Headquarters Company, members of the battalion’s Forward Support Company also congregate here for the once-a-month drills. Authorized strength for the two companies is about 200 soldiers, but only about half that many are available for drills because of deployments of battalion members to Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa, which contains Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia, Blandamer said.
