Have you ever met the CEO of Albertsons, or know what they look like? Might the finance manager of Wal-Mart be invited to dinner with your family? Is there a chance that WinCo’s director of human resources would lobby to put your name on a product?
It’s not a stretch to presume the answer to each above question is ‘no.’
For Tim Hines—who owns Missoula’s Pattee Creek Market along with his wife Elizabeth—these kinds of individualized, granular connections are the great reward of running an independent grocery store with a long track record in Missoula, where residents have plenty of options when deciding where to buy their food.
“Owning a business here, for a grocery business, is tough, because there’s a lot of competition,” Tim says. “Competition keeps you aware of everything. You just don’t get complacent; you don’t get relaxed. When there’s a dozen other grocery stores in Missoula, we want to be that friendly, small grocery store, but also offer great, quality product at a good price.”
As Tim notes, in a world of corporate largesse and global food sourcing—where decisions are by nature big, with big ripples and big timelines—Pattee Creek Market’s smallness is a virtue.
“We have the autonomy to make those decisions and make them pretty quick,” he says. “We can be nimble on what we bring in. We don't have to go through, ‘well, let me give it to my district manager and then my regional and then my corporate office and then put it in a planogram and then...’ No. Bitterroot Bison called me today. ‘All right, let’s bring it in.’ It’s source to source. There’s no ‘I’ll get back to you after a month of checking with all these different steps and people.’”
And with a bevy of local farms and ranches helping to keep Pattee Creek Market stocked with Montana-grown meat and produce, Tim and co. can utilize their smallness to support their neighbors who are also doing good work in the area. It’s a model of reciprocity and community that can realistically happen when things stay at a manageable, regional scale.
“They’re here, within our backyard,” Tim says, “why not use them and keep those dollars here locally? And this is good quality product, you know.”
Yes, the “backyard” Tim speaks of may be metaphorical, but there’s an operation thus far unmentioned that’s a little bit closer to the Hines’ actual backyard.
While some other grocers in Missoula do a decent job of sourcing products from the surrounding region, it’s tough to get more local than the Hines’ sheep farm, from which they bring in meat to sell at Pattee Creek Market.
The sheep farm is a family affair from top to bottom. What began as an operation run by Elizabeth’s father has since been taken over by Tim and Elizabeth, and even their kids are showing some signs of interest in continuing the lineage.
“My wife is heavily involved in [the farm],” he says. “She grew up doing that, raising lamb, showing sheep at 4-H. My daughter’s picked it up now, my son is into it as well."
“So not only are we producing for 4-H, with our local community buying our lambs to show in 4-H,” he continues, “but we are raising lamb also for the store. We know what the source is because it’s literally out our front door. We know how they’re raised; we know all of that. And we’re getting it processed locally in Corvallis, the same folks that we get our beef from. We know their facility, we know their capabilities, we’ll be bringing some more lambs down there in a couple of weeks for processing, and we’ll sell them here at the store.”
It's fair to say we’ve been circling this whole time around the real-world experience of connectivity. In a place like Pattee Creek Market, connectivity can, and often does, extend from food and family right through to the people who shop its aisles.
A store isn’t a store without customers, but at Pattee Creek Market a customer can mean so much more than just a person who spends their hard-earned money there.
“Whether it’s folks that [live in the apartments] behind the store and they're walking in daily, maybe multiple times a day because of their needs, or folks that live on the hill and just driving down, folks coming down [Southwest 39th Street] to and from work and pulling in, we have a very unique clientele,” Tim says. “But in our business standpoint, we want to get them not to go all the way down that road here to the corporate store, right?”
“We've done some social media things with who we are and why we're here and what we're trying to do and accomplish and staying local and building those relationships,” he continues. “And we’ve done that to where I’ve got customers who come in the store now, we chat, we’ve actually got some items named after them, [we’ve] been invited to folks’ homes to have dinner.”
Talking to Tim Hines, one gets the real sense that all of this is not a ploy to drum up business; it’s clearly a part of his and his family’s DNA.
“It’s not just, ‘I’m owning a store in Missoula and earning a paycheck and then I’m leaving.’ No. We’re here. We’re going to be neighbors. When you can see a customer come in and they say, ‘oh, that's my recipe right there. My name is on that.’ That's interesting. You're not going to go get that at the corporate store down the road.”
The Hines family loves to give back to our community, made clear by their devotion to local and regional goods, but also by their social media presence. Follow them on IG @PatteeCreekMarket for deals and teasers on what's to come or what's already in.
“Owning a business here, for a grocery business, is tough, because there’s a lot of competition...Competition keeps you aware of everything." Tim Hines
"I’ve got customers who come in the store now, we chat, we’ve actually got some items named after them, [we’ve] been invited to folks’ homes to have dinner.” Tim Hines