Five generations of the Cooper family have worked the aisles of Cooper’s Foods in St. Paul and Chaska, but the legacy has come to an end. The Coopers, who closed their 107-year-old Chaska store in early March, announced this week that their last store on St. Paul’s West Seventh Street will soon shutter.

“With a heavy heart I am sharing that our family will be closing our last remaining grocery store,” wrote Sara Cooper, in a May 19 Facebook post. “We have been honored to serve the West Seventh community since 1992.”

An official closing date was not announced.

The grocery’s departure from the West Seventh location, between St. Clair Avenue and Michigan Street, leaves the surrounding neighborhood with limited options for fresh produce, at least in convenient walking distance. A downtown Lunds and Byerlys grocery on 10th Street is about two miles away, and the Mississippi Market grocery co-op on East Seventh Street is three miles away. The site kept late-night hours.

Cooper’s Foods’ Highland Park location in the Sibley Plaza strip mall on West Seventh closed in 2017, though an Aldi supermarket opened there following a major remodeling of the strip mall two years later.

Interviewed shortly before the Sibley Plaza location shuttered, Gary Cooper said shrinking sales, difficult union negotiations, record-keeping related to the city’s then-new sick-leave mandate, the decline in strip mall tenancies and the store’s pension liabilities were of no help.

“I’m a 71-year-old man,” he said at the time. “If I can figure out a way to help somebody get in there and keep that store operating, I’ll do it.”

In an interview this February with Southwest News Media, Gary Cooper said competition from big box stores had taken a bite out of sales in the Chaska location, which closed March 2.

St. Paul City Council Member Rebecca Noecker posted to social media Thursday that she was saddened by the grocery’s departure from West Seventh Street and had contacted the city’s economic development team.

“We are ready to assist in making sure this part of W. 7th Street remains vibrant and provides amenities the neighborhood needs,” Noecker wrote. “For me and for so many community members, Cooper’s has been not only a lifeline for fresh food but also somewhere you’d always connect with a friendly face.”

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