The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (13 page)

In the years that followed, congressional hearings and litigation against the companies
drove the price of tobacco steadily downward as demand declined. In 1998, to end the
lawsuits, Big Tobacco agreed to pay the states more than two hundred billion dollars
to cover the health costs incurred by smoking. In 2004 the federal government ended
the tobacco subsidy. Under the buyout, tobacco company money would pay farmers around
seven dollars for every pound of tobacco they didn’t grow for the next decade.

Most of the farmers in Dean’s area took the buyout. James Lee Albert received his
and almost immediately underwent open-heart surgery at age sixty-seven, and that was
the end of his working life. One of his sons started boarding horses on the land.
Dean’s cousin Terry Neal, who had two hundred prime acres right across Route 220 from
Dean’s house, quit farming in 2005 and used most of his buyout money to pay off his
taxes and debts. It was too expensive for most tobacco farmers to convert to strawberries
or soy, so they just grew hay or let the land sit fallow, and the strange sight of
denuded fields at the height of the growing season was seen in Rockingham County.

The fall of textiles had different causes. The mills came to the Piedmont in the late
nineteenth century, mostly dispersed in small towns. Dan River opened in Danville
in 1882; the Cone brothers brought Proximity to Greensboro in 1895. The social code
in the mill towns was paternalistic and insular—the company took care of its employees
and fiercely opposed any union drives. In a place like Martinsville there was never
a real middle class, just managers and workers, and when the collapse began in the
1990s, the mill towns had nothing to fall back on. Some workers and local officials
blamed it on NAFTA, which took effect on the first day of 1994, ushered into being
by Democrats and Republicans alike. Others said it was the selfishness and greed of
the owners, who had prevented other industries from getting a foothold, then sold
out to conglomerates and Wall Street firms that had no loyalty to Danville or Greensboro.
Pro-business locals blamed high labor costs. Analysts in Washington and New York said
that it was all inevitable—technology and globalization. After years of cutbacks and
other warning signs, the end came with breathtaking speed, as companies that had been
the most important institutional pillars of their communities for over a century and
looked set to continue forever disappeared in rapid order: Tultex of Martinsville
filed for bankruptcy in 1999, Proximity of Greensboro in 2003, Dan River of Danville
in 2005; Hanes of Winston-Salem started closing plants in 2006, and by 2010 only one
skeletal factory was left. Hundreds of smaller businesses went away with them. A single
rural county in North Carolina—Surry, population seventy-three thousand—lost ten thousand
jobs in one decade.

Furniture making in the Piedmont was even older than textiles. In 2002, Bassett Furniture
celebrated its hundredth anniversary by constructing out of solid ash a chair more
than twenty feet high and weighing three tons. The chair toured the country for seven
years, going wherever Bassett Furniture stores were opened, before returning to Martinsville
and being installed in a parking lot on Main Street. But by then, low-cost Chinese
competition had wiped out most of the local furniture industry. Companies that couldn’t
convert to smaller, high-end domestic markets were doomed. The giant chair became
a memorial.

*   *   *

In 1997, the Piedmont was still in the early stages of the plague. Brick factories
stretching block after block were still alive, though starting to weaken. Miles of
acreage didn’t yet lie fallow, though some tobacco farmers were already getting out.
Most people still worked—it was rare to find employable locals on disability—and the
crack and meth scourge hadn’t yet made it to Rockingham County. In the center of Madison,
McFall Drug was still open with its lunch counter, alongside a men’s clothing store,
two furniture shops, a shoe store, and a couple of banks. Kmart had brought the first
big-box store to the area back in the 1980s, but there was not yet a single Wal-Mart
in Rockingham County. Still, most people knew that large forces were bearing down
and the area might be left behind. Dean always said that ambition wasn’t in the DNA
down here, but those who had a little and were still young didn’t stay around. The
return of a native with a college degree who had started a family and career up north
was rare enough to be noted. To people who didn’t know Dean Price well, it might have
looked like defeat.

He saw it as just the opposite. He came home to free himself from the grip of the
past, the poverty thinking. His father had tried to get away from it but he’d been
pulled back down, for those chains were strong. But Dean thought he could break them.

His mother was living alone in the house on Route 220, having finally kicked his father
out and divorced him. Dean’s father had moved to Burlington and married a woman there
and was living on a disability check from the government. Dean’s mother worked as
a nurse and worshipped at an ultraconservative Pentecostal church that was too much
for Dean. He moved into his late grandmother’s apartment at the back of the house.

In the early nineties, Route 220 had been widened into a four-lane highway starting
less than a mile south of the house and going all the way north to Roanoke, Virginia.
That was the family’s one saving grace, because land values multiplied as the road
became a long-haul trucking route. It also gave Dean a plan. From Greensboro to Roanoke
there were only one or two truck stops. Dean’s house stood on the roadside with nothing
much for several miles in either direction except a church with talking murals. He
decided to build a convenience store, fast-food restaurant, and gas station right
next to the house, on a couple of acres of land that he’d inherited from his grandmother.
And he came up with a marketing plan that reflected the sum total of his life experience
to that point.

In Pennsylvania he had learned about guerrilla marketing from a local chain of gas
stations and convenience stores called Sheetz. Dean had never seen anything like Sheetz.
In the South, you opened up a business and hoped people came in. But in Pennsylvania,
Sheetz grabbed the customers and brought them in, by lowballing the price of gas by
a few pennies. When Sheetz came into your area, you knew they were coming after your
business. Dean admired its success and decided to introduce discount fuel to the Southeast.
He bought a Tastee Freez franchise, which charged a low fee because the profit margins
on ice cream were also low. And to reach out and pull more local people in, he styled
his convenience store after a country market, with a front porch and old farm vehicles
parked outside. He drove around antique shops and flea markets looking for vintage
cola signs and ads for bread and grain painted on wood. His dream was to grow produce
on the Price tobacco farm—melons, strawberries, tomatoes, corn—and sell it fresh at
the store and teach his boys about farming. He came up with a name that caught on
fast: Red Birch Country Market. Birch for his maternal grandfather, red for the Redeemer’s
sacrifice. The company’s slogan was “A family business covered in the blood of Christ.”
His minority partners were his oldest sister and her husband. He imagined a chain
of Red Birch truck stops across the Southeast.

Dean opened for business on October 2, 1997. The price of gas was eighty-nine cents
a gallon.

The house stood just fifty feet from the store—too close, with the floodlights and
noise of trucks at all hours. His mother wanted to tear the house down and build a
new one farther from the road. Dean had a different idea. The house contained three
generations of family history, good and bad, and he didn’t want to lose that. So,
three days after opening the store, he undertook the monumental task of moving the
house away from the road down the grassy slope toward the tobacco fields and fishpond
on the Neal family land. First, he removed every brick from the outside walls and
chimney. He chainsawed the apartment off from the main house. Then he bolted six-by-sixes
underneath the house, jacked it up, laid other six-by-sixes on the ground, placed
six-inch metal poles between the two sets of six-by-sixes, and attached the house
to his front-end loader. It was something that he’d seen the Amish do in Pennsylvania.
Dean began rolling the house downhill on the metal pipes a few feet at a time. El
Niño slowed things down—there were four straight months of rain and mud—but by Thanksgiving
1998 the house was standing on a new foundation several hundred feet from Route 220,
now with white clapboard siding and a stone chimney, like a nineteenth-century farmhouse.
That whole year, Dean ran like a madman between the house and the store, keeping both
projects going. There had been plenty of skeptics, but when it was over, he knew that
he could do just about whatever he set his mind to.

The truck stop did well enough that in the summer of 2000, Dean opened another, forty-five
minutes’ drive north on 220 in Virginia, near the NASCAR speedway outside Martinsville.
Along with the store and gas station he opened a Bojangles’ franchise—the fried chicken,
biscuits, and pinto beans appealed to southern taste, and the margins were higher
than with Tastee Freez. His profits came from the Bojangles’—gas paid him just pennies
on the gallon. As for the country market, people loved the idea, but there was little
interest in fresh melons and vegetables. His customers wanted the convenience and
taste of fast food. Anyway, Food Lion could sell packaged produce trucked halfway
across the country for cheaper than what Dean grew on his grandpa Norfleet’s farm.
“Something changed in our country where quality doesn’t matter like it used to,” Dean
said. “I got to the point where I would lose money on the produce just to give it
that country image so people would come in for other things, such as Bojangles’. Cantaloupes
were a loss leader.”

Soon after opening the store in Virginia, Dean learned that Sheetz was coming to Martinsville—one
mile south of him on 220, all the way from Pennsylvania. He never thought there was
a chance in the world he’d have to compete with Sheetz, and for months after getting
the news he was worried sick, as if he were the prey and Sheetz the predator stalking
him. One day, while driving back from an antiquing trip to Mount Airy with the woman
who had become his second, and shortest-lived, wife, Dean had an epiphany: the only
thing Sheetz had on him was the price of fuel. But that was everything, since there
was no loyalty in this business and customers would leave you over two cents. Somehow
he hadn’t understood the importance of gas prices until that moment. The next week
he got on the phone with his jobber, the middleman who sold him his fuel. “We’ve got
’em on the food, we’ve got ’em on the location. When they open up they’re going to
drop the price of their fuel and try to take our business. Why don’t we try to be
the aggressor and drop our price now and gain volume when they open six months from
now?”

Instead of pumping a hundred thousand gallons a month and making fifteen cents a gallon,
he would pump two hundred fifty thousand gallons and make five cents a gallon. The
jobber would get half of that, and most of Dean’s half would go to the credit card
companies—with the new business model Dean would barely break even on gas. But it
was the only way to survive. After Sheetz opened, his margins went down, but he kept
his price right at theirs and stayed in business. What he learned later was that Exxon
Mobil was selling gas to Sheetz for three or four cents a gallon less than he had
to pay. That was the difference between two hundred fifty Sheetz stores and two Red
Birches. That was life as an entrepreneur.

Dean continued to pursue his goal of owning a chain of stores across the region, because
it was the closest he had ever come to freedom. He opened a third truck stop, with
a Bojangles’ and a Red Birch Country Market, a few miles north up 220 from the second
one, in a little furniture town called Bassett, and then a stand-alone Bojangles’
restaurant on the 220 Business strip heading out of Martinsville. So Route 220 became
his chain, linked all along that thirty-five-mile stretch of highway between two states,
the chain that he lived on. But the epiphany on the road from Mount Airy stayed with
him. Dean had a word for it: the oil companies had him hog-tied.

*   *   *

One day in the late nineties, shortly before he opened his second truck stop, Dean
was at an antiques store in Reidsville, a town between Stokesdale and Danville, and
he found himself reading a self-help book. Its message was: decide what you want to
do, believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can do it, then act on it. With one
part of his mind he was thinking, “I’ve got to be doing something else,” because he
was always antsy about wasting time, and he knew he was in that antiques store to
avoid going to his truck stop, which was already losing its appeal—the monotony of
day-to-day operations. But another part of him thought: “This is an investment in
you and your mind. You can’t be doing anything better than improving yourself.” So
he sat in the store all day and finished the book. He was aware of something stirring
within, a hunger to learn awakened—or reawakened, since he’d had it as a boy before
losing it out in the world of work.

Soon afterward, Dean made a discovery that changed his life. An electrician who had
done some work for him when he was moving the house asked what plans he had for his
business. Dean said, “I’d really like to go to Martinsville and build another convenience
store up there on the corner at the race track. But I’ll need about a million dollars.
Do you know anybody who’s got a million dollars?”

“I sure do,” the electrician said. “Rocky Carter.”

“You got his telephone number?”

“I’ll call him.” And the electrician called Rocky Carter on the spot.