An IGA grocery store in Conway, South Carolina, a fixture for sixty years in a small community just fifteen miles from Myrtle Beach, will shut its doors permanently in September. Three more IGA locations, in Latta, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia, will follow in the coming months, The U.S. Sun reported.
No one at the parent company offered a reason why.
Lowes Foods, described as a sister store to IGA and operated under the same corporate umbrella, Alex Lee Inc., confirmed the closures. Kelly Dillon Davis, Senior Director of Guest Engagement at Lowes Foods, issued a statement that managed to be both polished and empty of substance:
"It is always difficult to make a decision to close a store, and we regret any impact these closings may have on the communities we serve."
That's a corporate way of saying: we're leaving, and we'd rather not explain ourselves.
The Conway IGA store has been part of the community for six decades. Former employee Tonya M. Hyatt posted on Facebook that some of her colleagues had worked at the store for more than fifty years. That kind of tenure doesn't happen at a faceless big-box chain. It happens at a place people treat like home.
Hyatt's post captured the mood plainly:
"Our store [may be] ending but that family, love, unity and so many laughs will never end!"
The Latta location, roughly sixty miles from Myrtle Beach, will close on September 5. That date is specific and final. For Conway, the company said only "September," leaving employees and customers to wonder exactly when the lights go off.
Latta's mayor, Marcus McGirt, acknowledged the blow in a Facebook statement. He didn't sugarcoat the stakes:
"We recognize that this closure will have a significant impact on our community, especially our most vulnerable citizens, as well as families who have relied on shopping locally."
McGirt added that he remains "hopeful that it will lead to new opportunities for growth and investment in our town." That's the kind of optimism a small-town mayor has to project. Whether new investment actually materializes is another question entirely, one that towns across rural America have been asking for years, usually without a satisfying answer.
Alex Lee Inc. operates IGA, Lowes Foods, and KJ's Market. Davis stated that current Conway IGA employees would be offered positions at other Alex Lee locations. For workers who can't relocate, and in rural South Carolina, that's a lot of people, the company pledged "financial assistance to help with their transition."
What that assistance looks like in dollar terms, or how long it lasts, went unspecified. The gap between a corporate promise and a useful lifeline can be wide.
This pattern, a regional grocer pulling out of small communities and leaving longtime workers to fend for themselves, is not unique to the Carolinas. It has played out in Arkansas, Louisiana, and across the rural South in recent years.
Local resident David Brown, speaking to WMBF, put the practical consequences bluntly:
"It's gonna kind of be a situation where days are gonna get rough and different stores are gonna be packed behind this."
He's right. When a grocery store closes in a town like Latta, the next-closest option may be a long drive. Seniors without reliable transportation, families on tight budgets, and workers who shop on the way home from a shift all pay the price. The term "food desert" gets thrown around loosely in policy circles, but for residents of small South Carolina towns, it describes a real daily problem.
Four stores closing at once under a single corporate parent isn't a fluke. It reflects the relentless consolidation and competitive pressure reshaping the American grocery landscape. Large chains with deep pockets can absorb losses, undercut on price, and expand into new markets. Smaller and regional operators, the IGAs, the family-owned grocers, often can't keep pace.
The closures in Conway and Latta come at a time when national chains are aggressively competing on price, squeezing margins that regional players depend on to survive. The math is brutal: when a Walmart Supercenter or an Aldi opens within driving distance, a sixty-year-old IGA with higher overhead and smaller buying power faces a fight it often loses.
Meanwhile, some grocery companies are moving in the opposite direction. While IGA retreats from the Southeast, Publix has been opening new stores across Florida and gaining ground. The winners in today's grocery market are those with scale, brand loyalty, and capital to invest. The losers are the communities that depended on the stores that couldn't compete.
The IGA closures also fit a pattern of established grocers shutting down after years, sometimes decades, of operation. Whether it's a Mariano's in suburban Illinois or an IGA in rural South Carolina, the result for shoppers is the same: fewer choices, longer drives, and a neighborhood that feels a little emptier.
The most glaring absence in the entire announcement is a reason. Alex Lee Inc. confirmed the closures through its Lowes Foods subsidiary but offered no business rationale. Were the stores unprofitable? For how long? Did supply chain costs make them unsustainable? Did a corporate strategy shift prioritize Lowes Foods and KJ's Market over the IGA brand?
None of that was addressed. The U.S. Sun reported reaching out to Lowes Foods for comment, with no response noted.
The number of employees affected across all four closing stores also went unstated. For a company willing to issue polished regret, Alex Lee Inc. was remarkably stingy with the details that actually matter to the people whose livelihoods are at stake.
The locations of the North Carolina and Georgia stores set to close weren't disclosed either. Those communities are presumably dealing with the same uncertainty, and the same corporate silence, that Conway and Latta now face.
Even the major acquisition deals reshaping the grocery industry at least come with public filings, investor calls, and stated rationales. Four quiet closures in small Southern towns don't generate that kind of scrutiny. They just happen, and the people left behind adjust.
A grocery store in a small town isn't just a place to buy milk. It's an employer. It's where neighbors run into each other. It's a sign that the town is still a going concern. When the store closes, the signal it sends is as damaging as the lost convenience: this place is shrinking.
Mayor McGirt's statement acknowledged the impact on "our most vulnerable citizens." That's not rhetoric. In a town like Latta, population small enough that the mayor communicates major news via Facebook, losing the grocery store means elderly residents on fixed incomes may need to find rides to a store thirty or forty minutes away. It means the after-school job a teenager might have picked up no longer exists. It means the local tax base takes another hit.
Conway, closer to Myrtle Beach, likely has more alternatives within reach. But the sixty-year history of that IGA store suggests it served a role that a Walmart self-checkout lane doesn't replicate. Hyatt's tribute to her coworkers, some of whom spent half a century behind those counters, tells you something about what's being lost that no corporate statement can quantify.
Corporate America owes small-town customers more than a boilerplate expression of regret. But expecting more has become its own form of nostalgia.