GRINNELL, Kansas—A few weeks into the Covid-19 lockdown, a van with Colorado plates pulled up to the Hometown Grocery & Cafe in Grinnell, a town of 269 people in a county of 2,600. “I’m here to buy all of your toilet paper,” the driver said.
Through the shop window, owner Gwen Wolf could see toilet paper stacked high in the woman’s van. Many of Ms. Wolf’s regulars lived on farms far from the nearest town, and she didn’t like the idea of strangers depriving them of necessities. “I showed her the door,” recalled Ms. Wolf, a Gove County native.