The Austin Chronicle has
had a long-term relationship with the Wheatsville Co-op. Early on, Wheatsville
was one of our most economical sources of feeding the staff (then at about
10-15 people) when the occasion seemed to demand it. Stacks of cold cuts,
breads, fruit, cookies, chips… a Wheatsville spread would not only provide a
mass feeding, but supplementary sandwiches, often for days.
For a time, I lived a few blocks from the Chronicle office, on the tip
of an imaginary equilateral triangle with Wheatsville as the third point. I
didn’t have a car, so most evenings, after work, I would walk over to
Wheatsville and buy dinner. Occasionally, when I was really broke, I’d head
over to the Chronicle after hours, take any food remnants left from the
refrigerator and whip up a Wheatsville deli stew with whatever was on hand.
The Chronicle and I both moved out of the neighborhood within in the
last decade, but Wheatsville for lunch is still a hallowed Chronicle
tradition on Tuesdays.
Wheatsville, besides its critical place in Chronicle mythology, is a
crucial community center, a source of ideas and information, as well as food
and products. In a town with at least two great supermarkets — Central Market
and Whole Foods — Wheatsville also acts as a community center. This is both
its strength and its weakness. Ironically, many of the ideas about food and the
function of a supermarket, which Wheatsville and other co-ops pioneered, are
now what is making these super food stores so successful. No charges of any
kind of cross-cultural/economic imperialism here, Whole Foods was
developing many of the same ideas (and many different ones as well) at the same
time. One of the great legacies of the alternative food co-ops is their
influence on mainstream American supermarkets.
Beyond legacy, though, Wheatsville is an alive and thriving supermarket. It
was disturbing, then, for members to receive a notice from the store, saying
that business was down and the store was hurting; assistant politics editor Amy
Smith tells this whole story in this issue. This being Austin, so far the
community has responded by supporting Wheatsville (I know I have been back
several times recently), but a store doesn’t live and thrive on sympathy. It
flourishes because of an ongoing relationship with its customers. Wheatsville
is unique, of course, in that this relationship was its organizing sensibility.
This store, after all, was started by its customers.
For years now, the way our “Postmarks” section has worked is that I pass along most of the letters we
receive for inclusion within an issue. Currently, Lee Nichols is the
letter-meister, verifying letters and demanding full names, and all the letters
deemed “print-worthy” are readied for production. Each issue, when we design
the available “Postmarks” space, either Nick Barbaro or I pick the letters to
fill that space (we have oddly contradictory taste in letters and will often
run the same set in almost exactly reverse order).
Lately, though we’ve had more space, we’re also getting a lot more letters.
We’ve always tried to run as many as we could fit in each issue, and those
unprinted are saved for possible future use, but a lot, maybe almost half, are
never printed. Starting last week, all of those “print-worthy” letters we get
each week are being posted on the Chronicle‘s web page, whether or not
they’re published in the paper. The way things have been going, there will
probably always be more letters on the web than we are able to get into issues.
n
This article appears in November 8 • 1996 and November 8 • 1996 (Cover).