Carol Mottler of Conway, Ark., was on Interstate Highway 72 between Decatur and Champaign about 8 p.m. two days before Christmas when her car’s fuel gauge began putting out distress signals.
She had traveled this stretch before to visit relatives in Illinois, and she remembered there were few service stations in the area. She grew anxious. “I was on this desolate road. It was very cold and windy,” she later wrote.
Thinking she might find a gas station off the interstate, Mottler headed north on a country blacktop. She wandered for a while before finding the village of Cisco, where there was a gas station-but it was closed. Driving slowly to conserve fuel, she headed north to the next tiny town, Weldon, only to discover there was no service station there.
“I was feeling desperate and alone when I found a small convenience store at a crossroads outside Weldon. Even there, there were no gas pumps!” she wrote. But inside the country store, Mottler learned there was hope just five miles down the road in tiny Deland: an ultramodern convenience store and gas station in the middle of the lonely prairie.
“When I made it to Deland, two women’s faces peered out the window,” Mottler wrote. “I was very grateful for their helpful attitude and the fact that they were THERE!”
Such things occur with amazing frequency at Casey’s General Store in Deland (pronounced DEE-land), said store manager Sandy Jones, who received Mottler’s letter of thanks.
“Just the other day there were two elderly ladies from Mississippi who pulled up at 5:30 a.m. We don’t open until 6 usually, but you don’t often find two elderly women wandering around out here at that time of the morning looking for gasoline,” she said. “They were very happy to find us, and they couldn’t believe there was anything out here.”
If there is anything out where there appears to be nothing, it is probably a Casey’s General Store. Most urbanites who stick to the interstates are probably not aware of it, but Casey’s is quietly taking over the countryside.
This barn-motif chain of convenience stores dares to go where even Wal-Mart, Pizza Hut and Hardees fear to trade. And for better or worse, it already has transformed many rural byways in the Midwest.
Thanks to the steady march of Casey’s convenience stores, Midwest backroads travelers can find not only a ready and cheap supply of automotive fuel, but also fresh croissants, pizza, pickle loaf, diapers, dental floss, G.E. 30 amp fuses and Wells Lamont Cowhide Leather Gloves.
With the disappearance of small-town grocery stores and gas stations, Casey’s has found a ready niche. “We’re sort of stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with all this, but the only complaint I’ve had is that we don’t carry diesel fuel or kerosene,” said Jones, whose occupation was “town baby-sitter” before she became a convenience store manager.
Casey’s, then, offers one-stop shopping for one-horse towns, from Deland, Ill. (population 460), to De Soto, Iowa (1,033), to Desloge, Mo. (4,150).
Until the next one opens in a minute or two, there are 860 Casey’s stores in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Kansas-about 75 percent of them in towns with populations less than 5,000.
Of course, there are always those who don’t welcome outsiders, especially outsiders who are cash-cow competitors.
“Across the state of Iowa, in town after town the only thing that is left is Casey’s store, and that is a result in my opinion of their predatory pricing,” claimed Del Nelson of Spencer, Iowa, who owns a half-dozen combination gas station-convenience stores in that state.
Nelson is one of several hundred Iowa fuel merchants who have joined in a federal class-action civil suit that was filed in December 1990. It charges Casey’s with “predatory pricing for the purpose of destroying and unreasonably restricting competition in these small markets.”
The case, which Casey’s officials declined to comment on, is now scheduled to be heard Oct. 17 in U.S. District Court in Des Moines.
Although Casey’s, which is known for having the lowest fuel prices in any given setting, has inflamed competitors and others who fear the further Wal-Martization of small-town America, the company’s executives and employees claim to be boosters of rural life, not threats to it.
“The entire concept is oriented to the small community. We greet customers, we serve them and sell them, and we don’t have to tell our employees to use the small-town approach because they are small-town people already. They know their customers because they live together,” said Norma Hooper, who supervises Casey’s stores in the central Illinois stops of Cornell, Wenona, Varna, Minonk and Tonica-whose combined populations could almost go to the same show at the Gold Star Sardine Bar.
Casey’s stores are generally so far off the beaten path that few people realize this chain has been around 25 years. And though Casey’s has a lower profile than Wal-Mart or McDonald’s, this chain’s bottom line is big time by any measure.
Casey’s General Stores was named convenience store chain of the year in 1993 by Convenience Store Decisions magazine. The publication for the 7-Eleven and QuikTrip crowd praised Casey’s for its “well-documented ability to parlay an impressive living out of small towns that don’t even get on the search routes when most other operators are looking for new corners to conquer.”
Total sales for all Casey’s stores will top $720 million this year, and the chain is expanding at a rate faster than one new store a week, with a goal of 2,000 stores in 1996, according to Casey’s co-founder and president, Donald Lamberti, 56, of Ankeny, Iowa (population 18,482).
All Casey’s stores are within 500 miles of Ankeny, a Des Moines suburb, and all expansion will be within the same area because Lamberti and his stores are Midwestern to the bone, he said.
“I don’t know if our stores would work elsewhere in the country; I just know the type of people in the Midwest make good employees and good customers,” Lamberti said.
Ma and pa stores
“We are comparable to the old ma and pa stores, only with a little more structure and discipline. Our philosophy is to bring to the small towns the same convenience that big cities have,” said Lamberti, who noted that Casey’s is careful to cater to small-town tastes and mores. “We don’t handle cigarette rolling papers or risque magazines because we don’t think small-town America wants us to handle those, and we don’t do pinball machines or video games.”
He also pointed out that his stores close at 11 p.m., which eases concerns for his employees’ safety-and for his insurance premiums.
Casey’s corporate boss knows small-town merchandising because he grew up in it, and just behind it. Lamberti’s family lived in an apartment behind the Broadway Sales Co. country store in an unincorporated area between two mining towns north of Des Moines. His father, an Italian immigrant, left the coal mines and opened the store in 1935.
Lamberti took over the family business in 1960 and, eight years later, decided to expand. “I was young and dumb and a product of the Depression who read a lot of books on positive thinking,” he explained.
His first move was to take on a somewhat older and oil-wiser partner-Iowa gasoline distributor Kurvin C. Fish-who helped Lamberti find sites for his chain of newfangled, old-fashioned convenience stores.
“After we had four or five stores, we thought if we built 15 that would be all we’d want. And then after we had 15 built, we thought, well, there are 90 counties in the state and if we put 90 stores in Iowa that would be about all we could ever hope to develop,” said Fish, a native of Centralia, Ill.
“But then people started coming in from all over the country wanting to invest in stores-even some country-western stars in Nashville-but we decided we could do it ourselves,” noted Fish, 77, who retired a millionaire in 1982 and now lives in Naples, Fla.
Lamberti said the chain was modeled after his family’s old general store, though the company name came from Fish.
“We talked about calling it `Lamberti’s General Stores,’ but there are a lot of folks who don’t like Italians,” he explained. “We wanted a generic name that no one would dislike. People called Kurvin by his initials, K.C., so we took that, changing it to `Casey.’ “
Deland snags Casey’s
In his quest to expand his Casey’s empire, Lamberti has become undoubtedly the nation’s greatest expert on the market potential of small towns within a 500-mile radius of Ankeny. But when it comes to naming his favorite Casey’s town, Lamberti throws out the bottom line.
“My favorite store should probably be the one that makes us the most money, but it isn’t,” he said. “Instead, I’d have to say I really like the store in Deland, Ill., because they worked the hardest to get us to come there, and they really put on a show.”
There are certainly those who fear that one day all of the strip malls and convenience stores in America will be linked together and somehow lead to the destruction of modern civilization-as if that would be a bad thing. But you won’t find thinking of that sort in Deland, which lies 10 miles south of Farmer City and 20 miles west of Champaign on a patch of prairie so flat and unadorned that it’s said you can sometimes see far enough ahead to watch your own back.
Before Casey’s was lured to the edge of town four years ago, Deland residents had suffered without a grocery store, restaurant or gas station for any extended period for more than 10 years.
“The closest place with any kind of groceries was five miles away,” said Mayor Roger Wilke, who joined a local banker and lawyer in campaigning for a Casey’s. Their first move, because Deland was dry and Casey’s sells beer, was to stage a referendum to repeal the local prohibition against alcohol sales.
A vote to go wet
“The town had been dry for 25 years, but the vote was overwhelming in favor of going wet,” Jones said. “Of course, the little old ladies said they were voting for a gas station instead of for beer.”
Next, Wilke and his team lobbied Lamberti by telephone and mail. The Casey’s executive was skeptical. Deland is small, even by Casey’s standards. But Lamberti was intrigued by the town’s enthusiasm, so he drove over to Deland for a look.
“I found out that, in fact, it was a great location,” Lamberti said. “What really impressed us was that there is no other gas station on their highway for 40 miles, and also there is a lake down there near Clinton that draws a lot of recreational traffic in the summertime.”
And so, Casey’s came to tiny Deland, which, contrary to the Wal-Martization theories, has been blessed with a retail boom. A small family grocery and a restaurant have recently opened in town.
“Deland is still like every other small town. It’s quiet and we roll in the sidewalks fairly early,” Jones said. “But now, if you drive out this way after 10 p.m., you can see the lights for Casey’s.”
