For a little shop like the Bill Store an energy boom can be a blessing. Nothing is better for a small business than lots of customers with cash to burn. But when wells close and energy workers head out of town the businesses that remain have to figure out how to survive.
Verne Waldner bought the Conoco Service Station in Wamsutter Wyoming back in 1973. There wasn’t much to the town then, and there still isn’t. Wamsutter sits off Interstate 80 and has a current population of just under 500.
But Verne says that isolation has made his station an essential outpost for drivers passing through for decades. One winter, he said, “It snowed and snowed and everyone’s car broke down. This used to be a two bay garage, and we fit six vehicles in here overnight for them to thaw.”
In the 1970s Wamsutter was riding high on an oil boom and the Conoco station was also doing a brisk business serving industry vehicles. But by the early 80s energy was in a bust and the town emptied out. Gary Waldner, Verne’s son, remembers that time well.
“My fifth grade class we had sixty plus kids in the class, when we graduated in eighth grade we had eleven.”
Gary has worked in the service station on and off since he was kid. The station survived that 80s bust, as well as many of the energy industry’s ups and downs since. Gary says that’s because they follow a few rules, like saving money during a boom for leaner times.
I think we have learned through boom and bust that if you put all your eggs in one basket you are subject to those ups and downs.
“Cash reserves are huge,” Gary told me in the station’s back office. “When revenue is coming its easy to make [a] payment, but at some point it will go down. We just don’t know what those peaks and valleys are.”
Gary says another challenge is that during a boom service jobs can’t compete with oil field wages. He points out that right now the fast food place across the street from the station is paying thirteen dollars an hour to put together deli sandwiches.
“You know, It’s hard to pay somebody thirteen dollars an hour when in reality they are really only generating maybe seven.”
But the really, really important thing for running a small business in a boom bust town is this: you have to focus on your core customers. And in Wamsutter, those customers are coming off the interstate.
“I-80 is never going to move,” Gary said. “And if you are going to be here that has to be your long term plan. Because you can’t count on the oil and gas. It is a valve, and they can shut it off at any point.”
Head west from Wamsutter on I-80 for about seventy miles and you’ll hit Rock Springs. The town is much bigger than Wamsutter, current population about 25 thousand, but it was also built on energy development. Like Wamsutter its economy took a big hit during the energy downturn of the 1980s. But since then, the town has tried to diversify, said Wyoming Business Council member Pat Robbins.
“I think we have learned through boom and bust that if you put all your eggs in one basket you are subject to those ups and downs.”
Robbins said in recent years Rock Springs has focused on building alternative industries like tourism. For instance, the National High School Rodeo competition. “[It] raises the awareness of people around the country for what Sweetwater county has. It also raises the professionalism of the businesses and industry that capitalize on that.”
But the fact is the town also got lucky. The last decade has seen a major natural gas boom in the area. That’s been good news for Rock Springs hotel owner Mark Anselmi, who took a big hit when workers from the big energy companies abruptly stopped renting his rooms in the early 1980s. “That made me a little sick,” he told me in the conference room of Rock Spring’s Outlaw Inn.
Anselmi said that he is confident the Outlaw Inn can whether whatever comes next. “There is an old Basque saying ‘it is a great life if you just don’t weaken,’” he said. “You do the best with what you have, and keep on going.”
This stoicism, in good times and bad times, is a big part of why these small businesses owners have survived. Wamsutter service station owner Verne Waldner’s wife, Emma, was his business partner for decades. She has a saying about boom times.
“That is not the real world. Life will always come back down again.”
