As shoppers took the first items off shelves of the new Cash Wise Foods on Wednesday morning, dozens of community members gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony and official grand opening outside of Dickinson’s newest supermarket.
The store is opening in the Prairie Hills Mall in the space that for 37 years before it housed Kmart. It took nine months to turn KMart into Cash Wise.
Check out the video above to hear store director Matt Sellers’ take on the store’s opening and what Cash Wise has to offer.
Todd Anderson, service manager at T-Rex Conoco in Dickinson, talks to customer Bobby Metz, who came into the shop Wednesday while looking for an oil change. Anderson said business has slowed down along with the drop in oil prices, but said he’s somewhat happy to have a reprieve from the chaos of the boom. (Dustin Monke / The Dickinson Press)
Steve Keinzle noticed a change around the first of the year.
The manager of Mac’s Hardware in north Dickinson said his business catered to many oilfield service companies, both big and small — mostly hot-shot crews and roustabout companies — that would come in and buy everything from tools to flame-retardant gear for employees.
But when the oil prices dropped out, so did much of that business.
“Their budgets went away real fast,” Keinzle said. “And, of course, we felt that effect right away. The traffic is down.”
Many business owners and managers in Dickinson say they’re feeling the effects of the drop in oil prices as much as anyone else. For some businesses, traffic and profits are down. Others report steady customer flow not all that different from a year ago, when oil drilling in western North Dakota was at an all-time high — particularly around Dickinson.
Some say it isn’t all bad. They say they’re happy to have more time to work on projects, improve infrastructure and think ahead instead of worrying about the challenges the oil boom brought them over the past few years.
“It’s a nice reprieve to be able to slow down a little and catch a breath, because once things get going again, (business) will pick up,” said Todd Anderson, service manager at T-Rex Conoco off Third Avenue West in north Dickinson.
Anderson said he’s noticed a definite slowdown in work. Now his crew has time to take walk-in oil changes or fix vehicles without work being scheduled weeks in advance.
“I’d say equivalent to before the oil came,” he said.
On the other side of the building, T-Rex convenience store manager Vicki Nogosek said she is ordering less product than she did in 2014.
“You notice pretty much all day that it has slowed down a lot, just in gas and everything,” Nogosek said.
However, she said there is some good that has come with the slowdown in business.
Command Center branch manager Kristen Vesledahl, left, speaks to staffing specialist Rena Olheiser on April 22 at their downtown Dickinson, N.D.,office. Vesledahl and Olheiser said more people are coming to their staffing service looking for work since the oil prices dropped. (Dustin Monke / The Dickinson Press)
A few weeks ago, a man walked into Command Center, a temporary labor and staffing service in downtown Dickinson, and said he needed a job after being laid off from a high-paying position on an oil rig.
The man said he’d only work for $35 an hour, needed a minimum of 50 hours guaranteed each week, and wanted his housing paid for along with a $150 a day per diem.
After realizing the man wasn’t joking, staffing specialist Rena Olheiser responded in the kindest manner she could muster.
“Well good luck with that,” she said with a smile.
The days of high wages, overtime, free meals and company housing for many oil workers in the Bakken are coming to an end. At least for now.
This is especially true around Dickinson, where there isn’t a drilling rig within 50 miles and likely won’t be until the price of oil climbs back to levels oil companies deem profitable.
“I tell them here, ‘Everyone is expendable. Everyone,’” said Kristen Vesledahl, Command Center’s branch manager.
RURAL TAYLOR — When he first began working for Southwest Grain several years ago, Kent Candrian said there were days when he would walk about a mile or more at work — all of it in a 20-square-foot area.
Manning toggles and switches on a large wall switchboard, Candrian would make sure grain hauled to the Boyle Terminal between Gladstone and Taylor made it to the proper bins.
These days, Candrian still does that job. Instead, he sits in front of a bank of computer screens and does the majority of his work with the click of a mouse.
“I do everything in one spot,” said Candrian, a longtime driveway attendant for the CHS Inc. elevator. “Basically, it eliminates walking.”
Like many elevators, Southwest Grain has converted to automated systems that speed up its daily unloading of farmers’ trucks, its own loading of rail cars and also makes the lives of its employees easier.
“In the last four or five years, technology has advanced to the point where it just makes more sense because of the volume we do anymore,” Southwest Grain General Manager Delane Thom said. “It gets rid of some employee fatigue. It makes their job much easier and you can manage the whole system from one spot.”
The management company that ran Dickinson’s Hawks Point at its inception will soon be in charge once again.
Dickinson Investments LLC — the group that owns the senior living community on the Dickinson State University campus — announced Thursday that, beginning April 1, Senior Services of America will take over management of the facility.
Senior Services of America managed Hawks Point from its inception in 2007 until 2013, when the company was terminated by Dickinson Investments. From that time forward, the DSU Foundation managed the facility.
However, Dickinson Investments has been searching for a new management company since last November when North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem forced the Foundation into financial receivership.
Dustin Monke 