Kansas City (Missouri) Star Magazine – “Why I love living in small-town America” by Cindy Hoedel – February 15^th, 2014:

At Strong City Grocery Store, the teenage clerks start carrying sacks of groceries out to my car before the cashier is even done ringing them up. The first time, the girl returned with a puzzled look to tell me my car was locked — a city-slicker mistake. It took several times of trying to tip the kids who loaded the sacks into my car to learn that they would not take the money. They were polite but firm in turning it down. “We do that for everyone,” one girl said. Another time a young man said, “Thanks, but I don’t need that.”

Unlike in Kansas City, I know the UPS guy in my town by name. We have an agreement that if I’m expecting a package and not home, I leave the kitchen door unlocked and he puts my stuff inside.



There are also a few teens in town who happily and competently do odd jobs. When word got out that I needed eight large, deep holes dug for planting fruit trees, a 15-year-old from down the street came driving up in his pickup truck with a rifle on the front seat, asked me to show him where I wanted the holes, and set to digging. He was done two hours later and asked for $14, but I gave him more.

But of all the great old-fashioned service experiences I’ve encountered in my corner of rural Kansas, my favorite is a couple in their late 80s and early 90s who still farm and keep a refrigerator full of fresh eggs in their unlocked detached garage. You drive out to their farm just past the cemetery on the outskirts of town, let yourself into the garage, take your cartons of eggs and drop the money ($1.50 per dozen) in a rusty coffee can. They reuse egg cartons that customers bring back, so it’s a zero-waste operation as well as the best orange-yolked farm eggs around.