City of Spartanburg announces new Southside grocery store

After more than two years of vacancy, the City of Spartanburg has announced that Piggly Wiggly will move into the storefront formerly occupied by Save A Lot. Located at 550 South Church Street, within five minutes from Wofford’s campus, the well-known grocery chain provides students with another convenient grocery store option with affordable prices, along with Food Lion. 

The store is preparing to open its doors to the public by January 2022, with renovations and upfitting under way. According to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, the store will have a deli, a coffee shop, made-to-order pizza and a plethora of name brand and bargain grocery items. 

This additional option will make shopping easier and less of a hassle for Wofford students, said Hannah Albertson ’22: “Having another grocery store close by will be great for last minute ingredient runs and snack shopping,” while also noting that “this is mainly beneficial to students with cars and those living in the Senior Village.”

Accessibility was a key concern for residents of the Southside community of Spartanburg, which had been without a grocer since Save A Lot shut down unexpectedly in the middle of 2019. Since then, this neighborhood down the street from Wofford has been in what is considered a food desert, defined by the Food Empowerment Project as a “geographic area where residents’ access to affordable healthy food options (especially fresh fruits and vegetables) is restricted or nonexistent due to the absence of grocery stores within convenient traveling distance.” 

“The Southside has been in a food desert for more than two years now. It has been most difficult for residents without transportation, especially our seniors,” said Spartanburg City Councilwoman Ruth Littlejohn. 

Although the closest grocery stores to the neighborhood, Ingle’s and Walmart, are less than four miles away and ten to fifteen minutes by car, the majority of the community does not have access to personal transportation. 

This issue of inaccessibility was brought to the forefront in recent city council meetings, ultimately resulting in the council agreeing to provide a $300,000 start-up loan in April which was then bolstered by an additional $600,000 loan from the Mary Black Foundation. These financial incentives encouraged the Piggly Wiggly brand to ultimately decide on this location.

Littlejohn believes that with the return of an affordable grocery store in the area, the shopping experience will be simplified and made more accessible for locals in the neighborhood, reducing the four to five-hour SPARTA commute that many residents have had to undertake in the last two years. 

And, Littlejohn added, “Wofford students can encourage others to come and shop at the only Piggly Wiggly in Spartanburg.”