My name is Darlene Watson.

I'm part owner of Silverton Grocery.

Im Mark Watson.

I'm married to Darlene, and we've been doing this together for 34 years.

We both grew up here.

I moved here in 1980.

My father was a miner in the mines.

That's what brought him here.

I moved here in 1974.

I worked in the mine.

It was part of the mine shut down and lay off.

So we didn't have jobs.

The population of the community when the mines shut down really dropped.

It went from probably 900 people year round to about 500 or 600 now year round.

So we left for about a year working at other places and wanted to come back somehow.

If we didn't have to rely on the mine.

And one day Darlene said, why don't we open a grocery store?

So this specific store used to be called Green Street Grocery, and it opened in 1982.

Mark and I were not the original owners of this building.

We moved down here in 97 and we ran it ever since.

It's always difficult to find suppliers that want to come up here.

They don't want to come here because our location, they don't want to go over the mountain passes.

I feel like our population makes it difficult.

So they had set a high freight fee for us.

We work full time.

Whatever needs to be done, we jump in and do.

Whether it's covering a shift at the cash register or put in orders away or paperwork or bookkeeping work.

We obviously are getting older, over 34 years of doing it.

We have sacrificed a lot and we now have six grandchildren.

We would like to spend time being part of their life.

We are in the heart of the San Juan Mountains.

There are no close by towns.

The only large communities, around here are about 60 miles away in either direction.

In the wintertime, sometimes the roads on each side of the town are closed because of all the snow for days.

So we really depend upon a grocery here in town.

I get everyday essentials from the grocery store here.

And if I'm headed to Durango and I need something, I'll stop.

But I'm not going to make a special trip it.

I'm just remembering, you know, going into that grocery store when my refrigerator broke down, John wasn't around.

I took a bunch of ice chest just down to the grocery, and I'm buying all this ice and, Charlie, who is, one of the people who work there Darlene's sister, said, why are you buying all this ice?

And when I told her that I had no freezer in the refrigerator, she said, what?

You don't need to buy all this ice.

You just bring your stuff from the freezer to me.

We'll put it in our freezer here at the grocery store.

And it's that kind of kindness and service to the community that makes it so important.

I hate to see Mark and Darlene sell.

I know that over the years, if it hadn't been for them, my boys and I would have gone hungry more than once.

And this little grocery store here, you know, it helps support the community.

I think my thought about taking it off the market too was most everybody who showed any interest was corporate.

But our hopes would be to keep it local, to keep it.

Somebody who cares about the community not caring about New York City or Phoenix, somebody who really, whos in it just to keep it five years and flip it for a million more dollars.

I think I want people to know that we care.

We go above and beyond a lot of times to get product, to try to have what they want and what they need.

We understand that we're not Walmart.

We can't be a Walmart, but we do care about what's here for the community.