When your small-town store also becomes your post office

Editor’s note: This story is part of an ongoing series called “Rural Solutions” about efforts to address challenges in rural parts of Kansas. It is being curated by Journal reporters Stan Finger and Beccy Tanner based on ideas shared from the Kansas Sampler Foundation , based near Inman.

The modest general store on the corner of Second Avenue and Main Street in Norwich, with its angled awning on wooden pillars, echoes back to a time before two World Wars and automobiles brought profound change to retailing.

The shelves of Ye Olde General Store hold a little bit of everything, from nuts and bolts to kitchen basics to paint and plumbing supplies. Even strangers are greeted with a warm smile when they reach the simple counter in the corner.

If you can’t find something on the shelves, you can pretty much order it through the store’s online catalog.

In a walled-off corner, carved out of the back office on the south end of the store, sits another of the store’s goods and services. That is where Norwich’s community post office is tucked away, where residents can access their post office boxes and basic postal supplies 24 hours a day.

Norwich has not had a post office for many years. But residents say having that secure location in the heart of town is vital for this community of little more than 400 people less than 40 miles southwest of Wichita.

“I love it,” Sabrina Van Dyke says as she stands on a sleepy Main Street on a chilly winter’s morning. “We can show up at any point in time and know that our mail is here.”

It also means she can walk two blocks to get her mail from a post office box, when otherwise she would have to drive several miles.

According to data obtained from the U.S. Postal Service through a Freedom of Information Act request, Norwich is one of more than 30 Kansas towns and cities that have community post offices , often located in retail stores. The spaces are not allowed to be owned or staffed by the Postal Service or its employees.

There are several other criteria that must be met for a community post office to be approved, including having a designated space apart from the contractor’s business, not being in or next to a business in which intoxicating beverages are sold for consumption on the premises, and taking out a surety bond.

With rural areas of the state shrinking in population, many communities have had to get creative to ensure that residents have the services they need close to home. In some cases, that means local amenities such as Ye Olde General Store, to paraphrase the Travis Kelce Pfizer commercial, offering “two things” – or more – at once.

It’s a transition, though, that requires leadership. For it to work, June Hardaway, the owner of Ye Olde General Store, says a town has to have a business or individual willing to take on responsibility and a feasible location or inside space to put a post office.

“It does take some extra work,” particularly early on, Hardaway says, but she says it’s well worth it – especially for elderly residents. Many of them get their medications by mail, and having a post office box nearby means “it’s in a protected environment,” she points out. “We’ve even had medications come through that had to be refrigerated. We have a little refrigerator, and we were able to accommodate that.”

The benefits to the community and the store from this arrangement flow in both directions. “I feel like this is a win-win, because it helps you to be able to keep a small business with a little extra revenue coming in. And you keep your community alive,” Hardaway says.

‘Everyone’s having such a terrible time …’

Community post offices like the one in Norwich will likely become much more common in Kansas and nationwide as staffing shortages become more severe and the Postal Service strives to stanch financial losses.

In a sense, it is something of a return to the early days of Kansas, when a small town’s general store was where people went to send and receive mail via the stagecoach.

Selden was on the verge of losing its post office about 10 years ago after the clerk left and officials could not find a replacement. The grocery store there, Karl’s Cash Store, became a community post office so people would have a place in town to buy stamps and postal supplies.

The vacancy at the post office has been filled twice since. One of those clerks, Tammie Stevenson, says if employees had not been found, it is likely the Selden post office would have been closed.

“Everybody’s having such a terrible time finding help in general,” says Stevenson, who is now the postmaster in Oberlin. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

There have been three openings in her office in the two years she has been Oberlin’s postmaster, she says, and in that time span only two people applied for the jobs.

“They’re going to have to do some hard thinking about rural routes and stuff,” Stevenson says of the Postal Service. “Because if you can’t find people, what do you do?”

The current postal clerk in Selden, Jessica Wahrman, says rural carriers are hard to come by and in high demand.

“We have two carriers,” she says. “One of them does Selden and a little bit of Rexford, and the other one does a little bit of the Dresden area because they don’t have a post office.”

At a crossroads

Grover Cleveland was president when a post office was opened in tiny Vassar in Osage County in 1887. But after nearly 150 years, the town of about 200 no longer has a post office. The aging building next to Zion Lutheran Church was falling apart and the longtime clerk retired.

“It was kind of a temporary situation that went on for years and years and years,” says church secretary Jean Curtis.

Jennifer Roy, a veterinarian who owns South Shore Animal Hospital in Vassar, was approached about converting a small building she owns next door into a community post office, but she declined.

“For us to improve the building so that it meets code, we would have to pour way more money into it than the rent that we would ever receive off of it,” Roy says, “so it was like a no-brainer that we couldn’t do it.”

Breck’s Green Acres Restaurant down the road on K-268 serves as Vassar’s community post office, and most residents have mail delivered to mailboxes erected at their addresses and handled by a rural route mail carrier. There are no P.O. boxes at the restaurant, though.

“The people that live in Vassar who had to go to the post office every day to pick up their mail out of a P.O. box, they now have to drive into Lyndon,” Roy says. “That’s a bit of a hike” – at least seven miles. “If you’re a retired person and don’t really have a reason to go into Lyndon every day, that would be cumbersome.”

Rexford finds itself at a crossroads similar to Vassar’s: The longtime post office building has been closed for at least eight months because it was deemed unsafe. Lane Purcell, pastor of the local church, has lived in the Rexford area for almost three decades and says there have been some adjustments.

“Everybody had to put up mailboxes around town,” he says. His church didn’t, though, so instead Purcell takes advantage of the town’s multi-cubby P.O. box – which happens to be placed right in front of the old post office building.

“It’s OK,” he says. “I like having a post office. You get to talk to people and buy your stamps.”

Without a place for such casual social encounters, rural communities with fewer than 250 residents like Rexford often begin to lose their quiet charm and just become, well, quiet.

“We don’t have much going on here,” Purcell says as he walked his dachshund, Winnie, through the town’s wide streets on a brisk January day. According to him, the post office building was closed because of persistent roof leaks. There’s speculation it’ll reopen, but Purcell has his doubts.

Solutions Unique to the Community

Some communities, such as Gorham, have found ways to put the post office in a newer building. The Russell County burg of nearly 400 people has a small, well-kept postal building similar in design to the one in Selden, featuring residential boxes, stamps, shipping materials and a drop-box for outgoing packages. It’s close to most of the town’s eateries and places of interest, and it’s staffed during the workweek.

It’s convenient enough for Cheryl Hemken most of the time, who has lived a couple of blocks south of the post office for about seven years. She says the only major inconvenience is the hours. The lobby is open 24 hours a day but the clerk is only available weekdays from 8 a.m. to noon and on Saturdays from 9 to 10 a.m. Hemken says the schedule is usually fine.

“I just think there’s not enough going on to keep somebody here and paying them to stand around and wait for somebody to come in and mail something,” she says.

But it beats the alternative, which is not having a post office at all.

“Every town hates it when you lose your post office,” Corning City Clerk Diane Haverkamp says.

Adapting to loss

Over the past five years, eight Kansas towns have seen their post offices closed, according to data provided by the U.S. Postal Service.

The smallest town in the group was Freeport, which for decades held the distinction of being the smallest incorporated city in Kansas, with a population that did not reach double digits. The city was finally dissolved in 2017, and Freeport’s population can now be counted on one hand.

Offerle, with 179 residents according to the 2020 Census, is the largest town to have its post office closed in the last five years.

Hudson, a Stafford County hamlet with just under 100 residents, is known for two things: the Hudson Flour Mill, which produces the flour countless shoppers find on grocery store shelves around Kansas, and the Wheatland Cafe, which attracts diners from great distances for its hearty chicken dinners on Sundays.

Folks in Hudson miss their post office and “they were pretty vocal about it” for the first few years, says Shannon Bauer, who owns the Wheatland as well as the building that held the post office.

“We do have a good rural carrier,” she says. “He just does an excellent job.”

Every house in town has a mailbox now. If residents need stamps, they leave money in their mailbox and the rural carrier replaces it with the appropriate number. If the Wheatland’s stack of mail is unusually large on a given day, he’ll bring it inside the café.

He’s that good to everyone, Bauer says.

“We’re fortunate to have him, but he’s at retirement age and when he retires, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

She had not heard about the community post office option until she was contacted by the Journal.

“I don’t think anybody” in Hudson “even knows about stuff like that,” she says. “I’m definitely going to look into that. That’s cool.”

‘Blessed to have that service’

When her town of about 200 residents northeast of Manhattan lost its post office several years ago, the First Heritage Bank signed up to serve as a community post office.

“We feel blessed to have that service,” Haverkamp says. “It is a nice option, and it gets used a lot.”

Jackie Heideman has always lived in Corning, but until she transferred to a position at the First Heritage Bank branch in her hometown, she had no idea how busy the community post office is.

“One of the biggest things that we do is people who need to send packages,” Heideman says.

“They can’t just leave them in their mailbox and hope that the carrier will pick it up and make change for them if they leave $40 in there. So we do a lot of packages, which surprised me.”

Many people are now doing return receipt mailing, she says, so they can track their mailings.

“We have seen that pick up a lot,” Heideman says. “They want that extra item on there to know where their package or their parcel actually is located.”

Van Dyke says she likes knowing who is handling her mail in Norwich because she knows they will take good care of it.

In several towns across Kansas, a community post office is an outpost of convenience, not the only option.

Mount Hope, for instance, still has a U.S. Postal Service presence, but it also has what Barb Nowak likes to call a “village post office” in the town’s public library. There are no post office boxes in the library, just a display of stamps and mailers available atop a high shelf.

“Our hours are kind of opposite,” says Nowak, director of the library. “I’m usually open in the afternoon and one evening a week, and they’re open every morning.”

Community post offices aren’t unfamiliar to residents of urban areas, allowing residents to do their postal business often at a grocery store, cutting down on errands. But they are even more important  to small towns. On the surface, they might seem like a good alternative to a post office, but Hardaway says there’s no generic prescription.

“Every community has its own dynamics,” she says, “and I think you would just need to dive into that and see what that is and see who’s willing” to do it. “You’ve got to have somebody to go above and beyond in order to get it started, and then it can kind of run itself.”

In some cases, ensuring that the venture works calls for a bit of sacrifice. If there isn’t an adjoining structure available that could be converted to a community post office, she says, “the big thing is you’ve got someone who’s willing to give up (retail) space for it and do whatever it takes to make it work.”

In her case, the general store had a second access point on the south end of the building, so they put up a new wall and created sufficient space for nearly 100 post office boxes, about 85% of which are rented. They use a separate cash register to handle postal transactions and added doors to improve access to the post office boxes.

Not every town finds an acceptable solution to losing a post office, as Vassar shows, but Hardaway says small-town creativity can often find a way.

“If you’ve got a little city hall, why could you not put it in your city hall?” Hardaway says. “It doesn’t take much room, honestly.”

Journal writer AJ Dome contributed to this story.

A version of this article appears in the Spring 2024 issue of The Journal , a publication of the Kansas Leadership Center. To learn more about KLC, visit http://kansasleadershipcenter.org . Order your copy of the magazine at the KLC Store or subscribe to the print edition.

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