The Best Good News of 2025

The rescue & emotional currency of a beloved Santa Barbara grocery store

The Best Good News of 2025

I sound my barbaric yawp over the tile roofs of Santa Barbara! This past April, Santa Barbarans rejoiced in the news that Tri-County Produce — a cherished local institution for over forty years — had been rescued from pending closure via the help of local philanthropists Eric and Wendy Schmidt. It was an extraordinary business deal that will have lasting positive impacts in the Santa Barbara community. It is also, for the sake of our cultural anthropology-focused attention here at Beachtown Bohemia, a symbolic act of generosity that restores our faith in community-mindedness. (I felt a similar wave of awe when the Santa Barbara Bucket Brigade dug family homes out of the mud after the 2018 Montecito Debris Flow catastrophe.) These are act of love that speak loudly. They declare, “We will show up for each other in a crisis, no questions asked!” Tri-County is locally-owned, serves locals, and focuses their offerings on produce that is grown here in the Santa Barbara County region. Even more soulful is the fact that the store is now under the stewardship of two longtime Tri-County employees — a father and son with over twenty years of experience in the grocery store with it’s prior owner. The local-ness doesn’t get any more acute than at Tri-County.

Since moving to Santa Barbara in 2017, I have witnessed the loyalty of native Santa Barbarans to this community-serving market: Tri-County is spoken of with a reverence reserved for a favorite beach or beloved alma mater. (If you have ever spent time in Oakland or Berkeley, this is the same tone that is reserved for the holiness of Berkeley Bowl.) This independent grocery store is adored by people in town because it represents the essence of our region’s agricultural riches, our cultural heritage relating to cooking, and a commitment to the folks who walk in the door. It also hasn’t changed much in 40 years. (Note: I have addressed Santa Barbara’s grocery store landscape before, in my lovenote to The Eddy— also in Downtown Santa Barbara.)

The produce of Tri-County imagined as local denizens.

Locals Only Redefined

Growing up in a beach town, one hears the trope Locals Only in relation to surfing. Locals only is a phrase that suggests that we Californians stick to our geographic kind: ocean folk are afforded a slot in the surf line-up by virtue of living near the water, while inland folk are just tourists coming for a voyeuristic beach trip. I’d like to reappropriate this phrase for an entirely jubilant, positive use that is about local inclusion and celebration. Locals only is the ethos behind Tri-County’s meaning to the community. This little business is the poster child for the Slow Food Movement premise that we will all be healthier and treat our planet with more lovingkindness when we eat what grows around us, in season, and without chemicals. The Slow Food Movement is global, but Tri-County is a walking-talking manifestation of this idea tucked on lower Milpas Street with a taco truck parked out front.

Affection for the Building

I find the Tri-County building lovable. It’s a warehouse on a cement pad essentially, with one wall open to the fresh air with metal garage doors that roll down at closing time. We had our own version of Tri-County in Santa Cruz, where I grew up. Folks would park their square Volvos out front of Stapleton’s off River Street, and walk into a lofted-ceiling barn-like space with just about the same contents as Tri-County, but featuring Monterey Bay bounty: piles of local strawberries from Watsonville, avocados, artichokes from Salinas, a wall of transparent bins of nuts and dried fruit, shelves stocked with healthy cookies and Tiger Milk bars. It was haute hippy before that was a marketing gimmick. I liked the fact that the man at the register knew my mother’s name and would offer me a little cookie from a red tin behind the cash register. It was a personal experience — cozy even — to go grocery shopping that way. A community grocery store like Tri-County or Stapleton’s is like a farmer’s market, but it’s open all week long and in inclement weather. Santa Cruz’s Stapleton’s closed in the late 1990s. Real estate contexts change, populations shift, but I believe that if Santa Cruz had had an Eric and Wendy Schmidt, the magic of Stapleton’s could possibly have been kept alive. I am so glad for Santa Barbara that we can keep shopping at Tri-County, darting in for chilled wine before the dinner party, grabbing tortilla chips after school pickup, carefully gathering ingredients for gazpacho. We will keep making these retail memories at Tri-County. I raise my glass of SPORTea (a cult favorite sugar free energy drink made fresh at the market) high in the air and toast this variety of humanist, cheerful, local-serving capitalism. It could not be any more Beachtown Bohemian.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 52

Today’s feature from the Studio Shop

In 2018, I painted a series of botanicals as metaphors referencing the strength of the community in response to the Montecito Debris Flow catastrophe. The print is available for purchase from our Studio Shop via the button below.

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