Fighting for Bush dollars.

• Author: Forker, Jennifer

Unsuspecting urbanites may find this surprising, but Bush Alaska is the staging ground for a new kind of battle: the grocery wars.

Competition for Bush consumers is fierce, and it's not just rural retailers fighting for a piece of the action. National catalogs and the likes of Sam's Club and K-mart are strong-arming their way into rural homes. Soon, savvy on-line businesses may horn in.

"A large majority of our competition is from Anchorage, the Wal-Mart and Costco," says John Toone, a corporate development specialist for Alaska Commercial Co., one of the largest rural retailers in Alaska. "They actively advertise and solicit business in these communities."

Mark Divis, Wal-Mart's district manager, doesn't see it that way. While the company does mail monthly catalogs to more than 30,000 Bush residents, he says Wal-Mart hasn't made a big dent out there.

"We've entered into the market but we probably have not been as aggressive with that business as we have with the typical Wal-Mart store," Divis says. "It's still new for us and we're learning tremendous amounts. We're probably not even a presence in the (rural) market."

Until recent years companies like AC and Carr Gottstein Foods Co. didn't worry about competing with big-city retail stores. They focused on their traditional competitors, namely, each other. Meanwhile, mom-and-pop stores have struggled for years to keep up with their bigger, wealthier counterparts that offer lower prices and greater product quantity.

In the end, both may suffer as corporate titans and on-line profiteers dig out their niches.

"I think it's kind of like being in Anchorage and trying to be an independent owner," says Donald Dorsey, owner of Dorsey's Kiana Trading Post in the village 58 miles east of Kotzebue. "You've got the big guys out there slamming you."

"It's kind of dicey," he continues, noting that few independent retailers can survive in rural Alaska today.

Dorsey has reason to be worried. While Costco focuses on drawing rural businesses and Native corporations into its fold, Wal-Mart aims its advertisements at village consumers. And its influence stands to increase.

"We will continue to pursue that piece of (the market)," Divis says. "There is an opportunity (in Bush Alaska)."

Wal-Mart launched its Bush catalog services as soon as it opened its first store in Anchorage in March 1994. From the start there were problems meeting rural consumer needs, Divis says, because the catalog business was new to the...