'A little bit of everything:' Potts Family Grocery & More opens in Saskatchewan
For years, Samantha Potts and her children talked about starting a business. “We always said if we had the money to do it, we were going to do it,” she says.
Fortunately for the small east-central Saskatchewan town of Kamsack (population 1,800), the Potts family decided that business would be a grocery store.
“The price of groceries was just getting astronomical and we wanted to see if we could provide better prices,” Potts says. “Everybody’s got to eat, so we figured it was a good business to start up.”
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Enter Potts Family Grocery & More, which had its official opening in early June.
Potts, who has worked in various Loblaw Companies outlets and convenience stores all her working life, says the nearly 2,700 square-foot store aims to keep prices down due to its low overhead and a markup of about 30%. “If we get everything for a decent price, we try to keep the prices lower. Especially on the essential stuff. We’re not looking to gouge people for their groceries.”
Many customers have told her Potts Family Grocery prices are comparable to those in a box store 80 kilometres away in Yorkton, Sask., which is about 10 times bigger than Kamsack.
Potts, her three children and daughter-in-law put their savings together to launch the store with an investment of about $140,000. Some of that came from a loan from the Saskatchewan Indigenous Enterprise Foundation, which offers First Nations entrepreneurs access to capital to develop businesses.
Located on Third Avenue (Main St.), the store stocks a wide gamut of grocery items from produce, dairy, packaged meats, household products and pet supplies to canned and dried goods.
There is a small clothing section, with graphic t-shirts, hip-hop clothes and the Sacrid Beauty makeup and apparel line of Jacqueline Buffalo, a family relative from Alberta.
Potts Family Grocery also carries a variety of Sobeys’ Compliments brand items. The Compliments brand used to be sold at Prairie Family Centre, another grocery store in town that Potts worked at that closed a few years ago.
“Everybody in town missed it when the store closed so we decided to reach out to [Sobeys] and see if we could get them as a supplier. We’re independent though. We’re not under their banner; we just buy our stuff from them,” Potts says.
Potts Family Grocery is open daily from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. It serves the community, the three First Nations reserves in the area and people from small towns nearby such as Canora or Norquay.
“We still get new customers every day,” Potts says.
Along with word of mouth, the store is promoting itself via its Facebook page and newspaper ads every three weeks in the Kamsack Times, Canora Courier and Preeceville Progress.
Although the store had a soft opening in March, it waited until June to hold its official opening. “A lot of the areas are rural around here and lots of people couldn’t even get to town over the first couple of months we were open. We just held off until there was nicer weather.”
To celebrate the June 2 opening, the store gave away soda, cake and frozen treats, and held a drawing for raffle prizes that included a shopping cart full of $200 worth of groceries, a clothing package and $100 gift certificates.
The family is now considering opening new stores in other small towns that don’t have grocery stores.
“In Saskatchewan, there’s a lot of towns that don’t have any grocery stores at all. We think our little model that has a little bit of everything might do good elsewhere,” Potts says.
