COVID HERO: Alaskan Man Takes 14-Hour Boat Trips To Costco To Keep His Town Fed During Lockdown

How many people during this shutdown can personally claim to have saved 400 people from starving to death? This guy could… but he would never say it.

A tiny little Alaskan town, Gustavus, had their dock destroyed in a storm. That, together with the ferry system collapsing under the pandemic, and they were suddenly cut off from the world.

For a town that relies on that Ferry for their contact to the outside world — including groceries — that was a serious problem. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Along came their grocer, Toshua Parker, to the rescue with a totally ‘out of the box’ solution.

He bought an old 96-foot-long military landing craft and put it to use.

Toshua Parker, the owner of Icy Strait Wholesale in Gustavus, started loading shipping crates onto a boat to make a weekly 14-hour journey to a Costco in Juneau, 50 miles away, in order to supply his town with groceries.

Parker told the Post he picks up $30,000 worth of “basically everything–like milk, soil, meat” during his weekly voyages to Costco.

…Gustavus—which has no roads–began running out of supplies as the town went on lockdown, so Parker spoke with local fisherman and decided to make weekly trips on his “96-foot long converted military landing craft” – and scheduled the trips around tides and weather to Juneau.

“When we get to Juneau, we can’t get off the boat because of restrictions. So a different set of guys bring the supplies to the boat. Our guys load the stuff on the boat, Parker said. Then the staff of 15, turns around and makes the 7-hour voyage back to Gustavus where he uses the supplies to stock his grocery store.

…“We are going to keep doing what we’re doing,” said Parker. He is optimistic about the future, admitting he’ll “need to adjust to the new normal.”

“Toshua pretty much saved the town,” Gustavus’ Mayor Casipit said in an interview with Tanks Good News. “I really don’t know what we would’ve done without him.” —NewYorkPost

Next time AOC and her ilk sharpen their knives for the ‘eat the rich’ thinking, remind them that it wasn’t some big-government socialist intervention that saved the town.

It was an entrepreneur — a BUSINESSMAN, even — who saved the town.

He did what businessmen always do — he saw a need and connected that need to a solution.

He took some of his own capital, invested in a boat. Bought enough groceries per trip to equal some people’s annual paycheck, and fed his community.

Imagine what would have happened if AOC’s dream of redistributing all his money had been achieved.

Who would have come to the rescue of that town? Who would have even had the ability to solve that problem?

Probably nobody. Most likely, the families would have been picked up by boat and brought to some larger community to ride out the crisis in a state of limbo. Who knows WHAT impact such dislocation would have had on that little town, or who might never have gone back?

Parker may have literally saved not just his neighbors, but his hometown itself.

Keep your eyes open. You never know when even your most unexpected skill set might be exactly the solution a desperate situation calls for.