Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
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Kind: captions Language: en in many remote Alaskan towns this is just ordinary life [Music] Zack welcome back hey how you doing Bret pretty good so you’ve got a story this week that sounds like it’s gonna be pretty awesome you found this small town in Alaska and this is a place that was already pretty remote and cut off from civilization and now even more so tell us a little bit what you’ve learned here yeah so you know almost everyone the lower 48 states has had some kind of run-in with a supply chain issue at this point whether it’s you know you go to the store and you can’t find eggs you can’t find milk in many remote Alaskan towns this is just ordinary life so I was curious to look at a place where the supply chain is so ordinarily complicated that any extra rent she throw into the equation is almost devastating and there are some people finding really intuitive workarounds to these issues this little town that we chose to look at Gustavus Alaska population 400 it’s a place where there was no electricity until 1985 no cell phones until the mid 1900s last night I joined a town hall meeting by by telephone and there were five people on the call so and that was considered a monumental turnout for the town so that’s a quorum so this this town usually gets its it there’s one grocery store in town and typically they’ll get their groceries by ferry you can’t get to this town by automobile the only way you can get there is by plane or airplane or by plane or boat so for instance if you wanted to get there from San Francisco you would fly to Seattle you’d fly to Juneau Alaska and then you take a little seaplane from maybe a six seater seaplane from Juneau to Gustavus problem is that a few months ago that ferry went out of commission the state had a bunch of budget cuts the town is almost entirely dependent on tourism revenue so a lot of things just hit the fan at the same time and this grocery store owner had to find a new way to supply his town with not only groceries but rations supplies the local businesses also depended on him to bring over things like lumber and concrete so he bought his own barge 20,000 worth of stuff at a time and he’s doing these shipments once a week and basically feeling his entire town on those trips so not every town has such an altruistic person who’s willing to put the town on his back and and shoulder that sort of burden but this is just not some ordinary good citizen this is somebody who has pretty deep roots in this place and you’re telling me a little bit about his is was it his grandfather can you can you describe this this little backstory I thought that was fascinating yeah so his family goes way back in this town to 1917 his great-grandfather’s name was Abraham Lincoln Parker his father’s name is Lee Parker and his name’s Lane Parker comes from a long lineage of gustavus descendants and like many people in the town he he his family probably went up there to seek a kind of a remote lifestyle it’s it’s a very beautiful place it’s right next to Glacier Bay National Park which is just a tremendous place but the that remoteness and isolation sometimes comes with a cost you’re at the very end of the supply chain before he started his store there a gallon of milk in Gustavus was twelve dollars so you know you’d you’d buy it you’d get it and yeah the shipping company would get it in Seattle for like three bucks then they’d have to like load it onto the barge they’d have to ship it on this ridiculous journey across the ocean and all cost considered by the time it got there the mark-up would be like seven eight dollars so this guy basically found a more efficient way to minimize those logistics and reduce the cost a little bit on those Goods so abraham lincoln parker would probably proud well the other thing that interests me here is this is not just about one remote town in a remote place but it’s it’s really more story about the supply chain problems that many towns in rural america are going to start to face as this pandemic stretches out beyond the coverage areas there’s like a lot of people and what they’re what we’re reading in the pages of lots of newspapers and magazines so there was somebody who talked to it was a kansas state university who sort of shed light on some of the effect that we’re gonna see in rural towns can you tell us a little bit about that yeah this is like kind of an extreme example of remote or rural town this place in Alaska but there are plenty of towns small municipalities in the United States like in places like Kansas where there are one there’s one grocery store in town and in a lot of these places a lot of these places are so small that it doesn’t even make sense for a Walmart or a dollar store to come and crouch on the business there so the the grocery store is is on its own and a lot of time a lot of these owners are very old they’ve been into town for a long time there are kind of a town fixture and when they retire they have trouble having someone to fill their shoes finding someone to fill their shoes so a lot these grocery stores closed people are in a situation where they have to commute 30 or 40 minutes to the next town or the next grocery store over to get their stuff and especially with koban 19 right now when people are shelter in place that’s not a possibility for a lot of people aside from that you know the population who doesn’t have access to cars or who isn’t mobile for any reason so it’s a big issue we could see coronavirus having a pretty devastating impact on rural towns with a single grocery store like this and and even big shipping logistics companies freight companies will sometimes bypass these talents because this really makes sense to stop there so these towns are having to find ways to rely on local economies and farmers ranchers things like that to fill the void but sometimes even that’s not enough so in tandem with coronavirus we’re seeing this great ongoing decline of rural grocery stores that many people are trying to find a solution to it’s fascinating well more on Sunday definitely open Zak’s email and if you have stories of supply chain disruptions you want to share then send them to holler at the hustle and we’ll definitely take a look because we’re continuing to find these stories interesting and want to continue to cover those undiscovered stories for you all right thanks for joining a sack and everybody open your email and Sunday for more take care of one you