Humboldt’s Our Market is almost complete.
The grocery store is slated to open in the coming weeks, said owner Scotty Welch.
“End of the month or first of May,” he hopes, with an initial soft opening and then a grand opening “maybe later on in the week or a week after. … to try and get the door open to as many people as possible.”
“The soft opening is to get our cash registers set up,” Welch said, “to get all the kinks worked out, so that we know what’s going on.”
Our Market has already been taking appointments for butchering the past three weeks, and according to Welch, “we’ve got several appointments booked out down the road.”
As for what work on the store still remains, “we’re just getting everything sorted out,” explained Welch.
For instance, “We’ve got a company setting up copper lines, running them to the rack system. They’re going through the cooling displays right now and hooking up the lines to do freon and get ’em running.”
Welch said after that step, attention would shift to getting stock on the shelves.
Our Market will carry the top generics like Best Choice and Always Save, along with a variety of name brands.
“We’ll also get cash registers in by the end of the month, right before we open up,” added Welch, which in turn means hiring workers.
“I want to say 10 to 15 jobs, for sure,” he said.
He’s already been conducting interviews for the butcher shop.
Several factors contribute to making Welch feel optimistic about Our Market moving forward.
For one, “there’s a lot of traffic, because of the two big employers. That helps out a bunch,” he said; and community support has been nothing short of outstanding.
Welch has also been convinced from the beginning that a hybrid grocery store/butcher shop would be a local hit. “It’s like another enterprise inside the grocery store to help keep it open and turn a profit,” he noted.
Welch likewise pointed out that, “you know, you go to some stores and they don’t have a lot of variety like Walmart, but we’ve got a lot of shelving so we can kind of keep up.”
And if all else fails, Scotty promised that he and Amy would try to “be there every day, just to check on stuff.”
Looking back on the process of getting the store running, Welch remarked primarily on being surprised at how long it took.
“If they’d have said two years, I would’ve said ‘no way,’ figuring it’d be a lot quicker,” Welch noted, but unforeseen equipment issues, grant funding and COVID-19 prevented things from moving apace.
However, things are now not only proceeding quickly, the community is beginning to get in on the action.
