Longtime readers of PopCult probably know that I live in “the teeming metropolis of Dunbar,” a suburb of Charleston, West Virginia. I have lived here for my entire life.

Yesterday, a rumor that I’ve been hearing for probably four years was confirmed. Dunbar is losing it’s Kroger grocery store. Come June we will have to go Krogering  in another city.

This is not exactly a tragedy, at least not for me, personally, but it will really suck for the aged and carless populations of Dunbar who can’t easily hop into a car and drive across the river to the brand-new Kroger that’s opening in early June in the new Park Place shopping center.

See, Kroger is erecting a stately pleasure dome in South Charleston. This Xanadu will be a 122,00 square foot behemoth that will sell, not only groceries, but also toys, apparel, furniture, home goods, farm animals, heavy construction equipment and a modest selection of Tardis-like time travel devices. Oh, and they’ll have a fancy-ass cheese counter, too.

And when this gigantic Kroger, the largest in our small state, opens, then the axe shall fall on both the Riverwalk and Dunbar locations.

Riverwalk is no surprise. It’s right across MacCorkle Avenue from the new store. They are literally just moving across the street.

Dunbar, sadly, makes business sense. It’s only about a two-mile drive between the two stores, and they’ve been degrading the Dunbar location for years now. You would buy an item every week for years, then suddenly it would disappear. If you ever checked in a different Kroger, they’d still have it. The selection has been shrinking in Dunbar as they excised SKU after SKU.

Then there’s also the problem with the Dunbar Kroger keeping shopping carts, especially the smaller ones. Every time they’d get a new shipment of fifty of them in, within two months you’d only be able to find three or four in the store at the same time.

I think it’s from people who walk to the store “borrowing” them to get their groceries home, then deciding they’d sort of like to keep them as pets.

That had to eat into the bottom line. Those carts cost a few hundred bucks each.

Honestly, this will be a minor pain in the ass for me, but I’ll survive. Right now, I’m so familiar with the Dunbar location that I can sleepwalk through it and find everything I need (unless they mysteriously decided to just stop selling it in Dunbar). I will miss that.

The new store will be gigantic, and that means walking much farther with my aging knees. I’ll also probably have to take much longer to shop because they promise a toy department and I’m physically unable to pass one of those up.

Still, it is another sign of time marching on. As long as I’ve been alive, Dunbar has had a Kroger. First it was near the corner of Dunbar Avenue and 16th Street (now the site of a Dollar General), but then in the early 1970s, they moved to their current location as an anchor store in the Dunbar Shopping Center on the riverbank, near 10th Street.

Dunbar won’t be completely devoid of groceries. We still have the first Aldi that was built in West Virginia, but as nice as that store can be, it’s not a great replacement for the full-service deli, pharmacy, bakery and large meat and produce sections that Kroger has.

It would be nice if Kroger at least considered leaving the Dunbar Kroger Fuel Center in operation. It’s handy to have a place close by to cash in our fuel points for discounted gas. That has to be one of the most profitable things that the Dunbar location has to offer.

Now we have to wonder what’s going to happen to the soon-to-be-former Kroger buildings in Dunbar and at Riverwalk. Will they sit empty for years? Is there even a remote chance that another grocer might come to Dunbar? Will one of them be converted into a Flea Market or Peddler’s Mall?

Is some moron going to start clamoring for them to be replaced with a Trader Joe’s?

Another question is, will Park Place get any really cool stores?  I mean, Menards has a killer toy train section for part of the year, and I do wear Skechers, but aside from those, all we know about are a bunch of restaurants that, aside from Huey Magoo’s, don’t look appealing to me. Will they at least get some of the stores that are sure to bail out of the Charleston Town Center?

As with everything, only time will tell.

I do have to admit to being curious about buying some Kroger pants.