Sherm Bought Local

Thank you, Sherm Olsrud.

He died this week, and the tributes pour in: Philanthropist.

There is another way to serve the community. 

He bought local.

Sherm and Wanda Olsrud owned and operated grocery stores, made a great deal of money, and gave much of it away to the local community. Help kids. Help parks. Help hospitals. Help 4-H. Help the many good things that make a community work better.  

Philanthropy is more than just donating the proceeds of a successful business. 

It is also the commerce itself that serves the greater good.

This is a lesson/message I share with young people, who look ahead at their lives and potential careers and want to have significance and meaning. I tell them that commerce is an avenue of service.

Many of them in a college environment have learned a dichotomy that capitalism is necessarily exploitive and bad, while socialism means equality and justice. That "corporate" means bad, and they are pitted against "the people" who represent good. That "business" is cold and meaningless, while "non-profit" means serving the community.

It is more complicated and different from that. Business is service, too.

Sherm bought local produce.

I was able to put myself through college by growing and selling cantaloupes and watermelons into the local markets during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and then as a part time extra-income project for many years after.  Sherm's markets were an essential part of that.

My melon field

I was small potatoes, by 
anyone's standards. I grew one 
acre of melons, on the family farm at the base of the Table Rocks. Sherm had competitors, and Safeway was a big one. Safeway handles melons the efficient way. They had big system-wide purchasing and distribution networks. They bought melons out of Central America in the spring, out of Mexico later, then California, and then the big melon fields of Hermiston in August and September. They bought in truckloads, sent to distribution centers. 

They didn't want to bother with the likes of me, inserting myself into their well-oiled machine. I would just have melons for 40 or so days, then the local season would end.

Sherm did it differently. 

A local grower could go to the produce department at the back of his stores, show the produce manager a sample of his crop, get a vendor number, and begin delivering melons the next day. 

Factory melons, picked green to ship

This wasn't charity or philanthropy. His produce departments bought them at the market price, which was set by the supply and demand of the giant factory 
farm/wholesale markets. The point is that 
he substituted from the 52-week distribution cycle to buy local when he could, at the fair market price. He accommodated the natural growing season and local grower.

It served the shopper. My melons were better. They were picked vine ripe and were on the shelf within a day of being picked. Of course they were better.

Factory-farm/wholesale distribution melons are picked green and are bred and sized for eye-appeal to the consumer ten or twenty days after picking, when they are box-ripened in storage, and show up on the shelf. I don't eat those melons, but don't condemn them. If shoppers in Oregon want melons in February, then that is exactly what they should expect. 

But, in fact, vine ripe, fresh local melons taste way better, and if the reader has ever eaten one, they know. 

It served the local community. I was not the only local vendor. I saw vendors of local tomatoes and cucumbers and corn going in and out of the back door at Sherm's. Like me, they re-used the sturdy double-walled banana boxes that serve nicely for re-use. It provided income for other family farmers with small plots of farm land.

It served me. I was a young, hungry college kid, hustling, fighting forest fires by day and getting up early to pick and deliver melons, trying to get enough money together to pay my tuition bill.

When the melons ripen in big volumes on hot days of late August and September, my melons would swamp the local Farmers Market type places. I needed the big store capacity of Sherm, with lots of shoppers and big newspaper ads. He bought my melons. He did ads: Local cantaloupes!  

Local, for Sherm.

I could pay my tuition bill.

Sherm was a philanthropist, yes. But not just in what he did with the money he made, but how he made it. He took the trouble. 

Thanks, Sherm.