A longtime Grants Supermarket in Richlands, Virginia, shut down for good after electric bills averaging $25,000 a month made renewing the lease impossible, and locals now fear more storefronts will follow.
The family-owned store closed permanently on October 10 when regular business hours ended. Grants Supermarket decided not to renew its lease in the small Southwest Virginia town roughly 185 miles northwest of Greensboro, North Carolina.
The Sun reported the chain blamed skyrocketing utility costs for the exit. The Richlands location had been open for 25 years. The broader Grants operation has run since 1949 and still fields more than 15 stores across West Virginia and Southwest Virginia.
In a statement, the company tied the closure straight to the power bills.
"Like many families and businesses throughout our community, we have struggled with increasing utility expenses,"
Grants continued:
"With the lease nearing its end, these continuing costs made the difficult decision not to renew unavoidable."
That average monthly electric bill sat around $25,000 since 2024. For commercial accounts like the supermarket, rates virtually doubled. Residential customers in the area saw bills spike 66 percent after the generator project was confirmed the same year.
Richlands operates its own public electric utility. The town council raised rates earlier this summer to cover future debt on a new generator. Tazewell County has run municipal electric service since 1922, so customers have long depended on this government-run system rather than a competitive private market.
North Carolina contractor Quantum Power Inc. is installing the generator. Officials pegged the expected cost at $14 million. Richlands council member Laura Mollo told reporters she expects the final figure to hit $19 million. She linked the rate increase directly to the need to account for that coming debt.
When a town hall both sets the rates and green-lights multimillion-dollar equipment, local employers have nowhere else to shop for power. Grants absorbed the hit until the lease came due, then walked away. The shutdown leaves only one similar grocer serving the area.
Longtime customer Wilma Keen has shopped the Richlands Grants store since it opened a quarter-century ago. She works at the H&R Block office in the center of town and voiced the worry now spreading among residents.
"It's sad,"
Keen said.
"Because now I'm sitting here thinking, what's going to close next? Will Roses close next? Will CVS close next?"
She added that she wonders how high the power bills run at her own workplace and other remaining businesses.
"I work at H&R Block, which is dead center in the town of Richlands. I wonder how much their power bills are. Everything is going to try to get out of town, I guess."
Tazewell County counts more than 5,000 residents. In a place that size, losing a full-service grocery is not a minor inconvenience. It thins the tax base, shortens the errand list, and signals that fixed costs controlled by the local utility can push even a 75-year-old regional chain to the exit.
While Grants shuttered the Richlands site, rival Food Lion is moving the opposite direction. The larger chain is opening six new stores this fall. Last fall another beloved regional supermarket closed eight locations. Industry analysts had already projected roughly 15,000 store closures across retail in 2025, and a major Kroger acquisition deal worth $1.6 billion underscored how quickly the grocery map is being redrawn.
Those broader pressures make the Richlands numbers harder to ignore. A family company that survived since Harry Truman’s first term could not absorb doubled commercial electric rates and a $25,000 average monthly bill. The town’s own rate decision, timed to a generator project that may cost $5 million more than first advertised, became the breaking point once the lease expired.
Municipal utilities often sell themselves as community-minded. Ratepayers still write the checks. When those rates jump 66 percent for households and roughly double for stores, the predictable result is empty shelves and locked doors. Keen’s question about what closes next is the rational response from people who live with the consequences.
Grants Supermarket followed the only math that still worked: end the lease, stop the bleeding, and protect the rest of the chain. Richlands now has one fewer place to buy groceries and a fresh reminder that public power projects do not stay free once the debt service begins.
Main Street businesses can cut labor, trim hours, and hunt for savings. They cannot shop around for a different electric company when the town itself owns the wires and just raised the rates to pay for a generator. Another storefront goes dark, and the bill still comes due.