The town of Honor, in northern Michigan, doesn’t have too many places to shop for food. The only grocery store in town is Honor Family Market, one of a shrinking number of independent grocers left in the United States.

Because it’s the only market in town, it has an outsize role in this community of 330 residents. The 12,000-square-foot store, its shelves filled with local products like honey, baked goods and homemade bratwursts, is not only a place where people — in Honor and elsewhere in Benzie County — go to buy meat and produce. It’s also where they can go to get free — or at a reduced cost — food and supplies for community events like football games or the annual National Coho Salmon Festival in the summer.

The store has nine full- and nine part-time workers, and hundreds of Honor’s high school students have worked their first jobs there, sweeping the well-worn linoleum floor, stacking groceries in the narrow aisles or bagging at the three checkout lanes.

The store is “paramount for a healthy, living, breathing community,” said Ingemar Johansson, a resident and president of Honor Area Restoration Project, a nonprofit business development group. “Everybody shops there. You run into somebody you know every time you go.”