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For the new owners of Mr. D’s Food Center in Powell, it’s like coming home to Wyoming.
The sale of Mr. D’s in Powell to Darin and Valerie Hill of Ridgeway, Colorado, is …
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For the new owners of Mr. D’s Food Center in Powell, it’s like coming home to Wyoming.
The sale of Mr. D’s in Powell to Darin and Valerie Hill of Ridgeway, Colorado, is effective Saturday. Then on Sunday, the Hills will also become owners of Red Apple Supermarket in Lovell.
Darin and Valerie Hill own nine grocery stores in Colorado, Arizona and Nevada. They are Casper natives.
For the immediate future, the name of the store will remain Mr. D’s Food Center. It will become The Market at Powell after a store remodeling is completed in early 2021. A facelift and remodeling project is presently in the planning stage.
In a telephone interview Wednesday, Darin Hill said he and his wife are energized by the return to Wyoming as store owners.
“I love the area,” Darin Hill said. “Growing up in Wyoming, it feels good. It feels refreshing. Twenty-one years ago, we tried to buy a store in Wyoming. Eventually we settled in Colorado because a store was available there.”
The new owners do not plan to make personnel changes. Kami Scott will remain as general manager of the store, and all workers will be retained.
“We are a husband-wife team that has these stores. We’re not corporate types,” Hill said. “Our philosophy is every store manager, every department manager, every employee knows a million times better what Powell wants, and they’ll respond. We’re not a cookie-cutter type store.”
“We’re successful because of our people. We value people,” he added. “I love the business. I love the customers. We just want to take care of them and give them good service.”
It’s a reunion of sorts for the new owners and Kami Scott.
“It’s ironic. Kami and I worked together 10 or 12 years ago in Colorado,” Hill said. “Little did we know that we’d be working together again.”
Six of the Hills’ other stores are in Colorado. The locations are at Ridgeway, Telluride, Rangely, Cripple Creek, Vail and Mountain Village.
“We’ll start a remodel job in January or February,” Hill said. “The first one I’ve done in COVID times was in Nevada. It used to take about six weeks. It takes a little longer now.”
The Hills are purchasing the grocery store from the Motherways, a Lander-based family that bought the store from Powell’s Kolb family in 2014; the Kolbs had owned the business for 68 years.
