What a wild few days. Earthquakes in Short Pump and now — Ukrop's is in play?

For the past few days, the Interwebs and other news sources have been alive with speculation about the future of the venerable grocery stores, the first of which opened in 1937. Ukrop's isn't the oldest family-owned business in town; Sauer's I believe holds that distinction (founded in 1887). But it is one of the most beloved, and one of the few remaining of its kind.

Until recently, Ukrop's incredible brand loyalty earned the company between 25 percent to 40 percent percent of the market, which is quite astounding considering the intense competition. But market demographics shift, a phenomenon my colleague Jack Cooksey examined last May.

Here's a store that doesn't open on Sundays or sell alcohol. But changes are afoot, although what these may be is just speculation at this point. (Apparently Bobby Ukrop agrees with me.) How much does Ukrop's mean to us?

Though the analogy isn't quite exact, the Green Bay Packers have been a publicly held, nonprofit corporation since 1923, with the fans and community of Green Bay essentially owning the team. (Full disclosure: I had no idea about this until it was mentioned to me by an associate here, designer Jason Smith. Sports is not my beat.)

Jason suggested a similar model for Ukrop's: People would buy into the store and they'd have bumper stickers — I AM UKROP'S or UKROPOLIS. if the chain altered its policy on Sunday closing and not selling beer and wine, I bet people would line up to support it. Call me crazy, but some of us are getting weary of losing aspects of our hometown that made Richmond Richmond, mostly in a good way.

The absorption of Ukrop's by some Borg-like chain would be yet another blow to Richmond's individuality. First our big retail stores went (Miller & Rhoads, Thalhimers), then our larger homegrown financial institutions got bought out (now North Carolina seemingly owns the lien on Richmond), then bad management and a downshifting economy closed Circuit City (I can even remember the old WARD's Loading Dock commercials). And now ... Ukrop's?

The demographics of the city are changing; more people are coming here from municipalities where stores are open all the time and they sell beer and wine. According to available census data, about 68 percent of Richmonders aren't originally from here (making me, too, part of a dying breed). Ukrop's isn't as deeply rooted a fixture to everybody here as it once was.

No matter how great their philanthropy, or the public-spiritedness they exhibit, there are some who'll never forgive the Ukrops for leading a 1996 letter-writing campaign to get Howard Stern off the air at WVGO-FM. (And the hipsters say Richmond doesn't forget anything!)

It was a principled stand, though you might not have have agreed with the principles.

Some here act like it was yesterday at noon. They shouldn't forget that Stern got the Richmond-based  Benchmark Communications, owners of WVGO, fined a total of $10,000 for his descriptions of sex on two different occasions. Around that time, Benchmark was sold to chain radio company ABS, and it was ABS that pulled Stern's plug. Ken Brown, the president of ABS, said at the time, as quoted in the University of Richmond Collegian, "Everybody wanted to make it a Ukrop issue," he said. "The letter did not influence the rest of the world. It may have influenced their little world, but it was just a mistake on their part."
 
Of course, ultimately Stern went off terrestrial radio, and last I heard, post-divorce, he's doing OK. ABS was later that summer gobbled up by SFX radio, WVGO's call letters got moved to a different frequency and the old 104.7 is a religious station now.

Then, too, Ukrop's got into banking and edifice-building, with the Virginia Performing Arts Center an unintended  imbroglio that was supposed to deliver to Richmond a shining new center for the arts but was instead bogged down by charges from the blogosphere (some valid, some less so) of elitism and mismanagement of public money. It's opening this fall, delayed, under a new name and smaller than originally planned.

I imagine that in boardrooms and executive offices around town, there are some deep discussions going on. I can't predict what'll happen, but we know this: If you don't adapt, you die.