NEWELL—After months of remodeling, reordering, restocking, rehiring and creating anticipation for the entire town, it came down to one post on social media on Saturday morning, April 11, stating “we are open.”
This was how the Hitch’n Post Market announced it was now open for business. No hoopla, no advertisement, no celebration, nope, just a post on social media. But that is all it took to send the masses into the store to see what had been brewing over the past few months.
But this was by design. Rodney and Gloria Peachey, owners, were excited, yet nervous for the opening as well. “I have another gal doing the Facebook page—I’m not doing that personally—I told her not to tell anybody until we’ve been open for an hour or two, and then, I said, I think it’s okay—we had to make sure that everything was working out and running,” explained Rodney.
The town of Newell lost its grocery store when Howdy Hobernicht closed Newmart Grocery Store on June 30, 2025. The rumors started about possibilities of a new grocery store, and then changes to the building started happening and excitement started building!
In February, a new billboard went up outside of town with the new name of the grocery store and a notice that the store was actually hiring! That made the community know that the time was getting closer! Opening would be happening soon!
Then, in early March, Hitch’n Post Market page appeared on Facebook and the teasing began! Posts of new products and shelves slowly filling up began to appear! Updates were happening often. The public made comment after comment on the posts proclaiming how excited they were for the store to open!
The grocers started the remodel last September. For the past six months they have been working hard. “There was a suspended ceiling in here—we took that all out. There was insulation above that, so we took that all down and just exposed the existing ceiling. There had been a roof leak years ago that was repaired, and so the ceiling was falling down. We just patched that up and redid the ceiling, re-insulated—lots more insulation in the attic and lots of paint—buckets and buckets of paint,” said Rodney. “New heating and new air system was installed and the floor was really bad, so we poured another layer of concrete in here. We upgraded the coolers and added the deli.”
Rodney is well aware that even though the Newell community is excited for the store to open, it is going to take attracting customers from surrounding communities to help it thrive.“I feel like we need to, to survive. That’s what we hope the bulk products and the Walnut Creek products will do. We’ll try to expand that and bring more products in as people see them, like them and need them,” he explained. “But to make it, to draw everybody in, we needed to do the regular grocery and the produce and the milk and the fresh meat—that’s another thing we want to expand quite a bit on—the fresh meat. Right now we have just the ground beef and steaks and pork roasts and chicken, but we’ll branch out to whatever people want.”
Another new service available at the store is a deli. “We have a variety of cheeses and meats, and any of these are sliced on demand—fresh sliced,” said Rodney. “There will be some ready-to-go sandwiches and drinks—we just want to be here for whatever people need.”
Another service the Hitchin’ Post would like to explore is providing wholesale food for the local restaurants and schools as they are able to order in larger quantities.
The store has ten employees who are eager to work at the new business. Currently, store hours are from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. six days a week. The store is closed on Sundays. They hope as time goes by they will be open later, perhaps in the busiest part of the summer.
The Peachey family moved to Newell in 2019 and enjoy the area. They also run Prairie Lane Farm. Rodney says the community has been supportive in his latest endeavor, and he could tell they were excited about the new place by the way they would drive by slowly, peering in the windows and also just from visiting with them.
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