eality television has painted a somewhat distorted picture of life in Bush Alaska. Shows like Alaskan Bush People and Alaska: The Last Frontier depict families living life off-the-grid, chopping wood to build their cabins, and hunting and gathering to put food on the table.

But even the hardiest of those living in the Alaska Bush head to the store at least occasionally to stock their pantry and purchase clothes, furniture, and other personal items.

It just takes a bit more effort—and an airplane—to do what is an easy afternoon errand for the rest of Alaska.

“We’re a service provider,” says Clinton White, owner and operator of Anchorage-based Greatland Grocery & Supply, an online store that serves all of Alaska. “We market ourselves as a grocery store, but really we’re a supplier of goods that Bush communities need.”

Even for businesses that predominantly serve more traditional customers, Bush orders still comprise a significant portion of their sales.

“It’s amazing how much stuff goes out in the Bush,” says Ron Bailey, president of Bailey’s Furniture, which has showrooms in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Wasilla, and Soldotna. “I’d estimate that 10 to 15 percent of our sales are Bush orders.”

And what’s delivered to Bush communities is as varied as the people who live and work there.

“I’ve hauled everything from sled dogs to CAT parts for bulldozers, caskets, even peregrine falcons several times,” says Eric Sieh, pilot and owner of the Kotzebue-based Arctic Backcountry Flying Service. “Just about most things you can think of, I may have flown it.”

Without any brick and mortar stores in the Alaska Bush, there are no quick trips to Fred Meyer for a dozen eggs or some last-minute shopping for Thanksgiving dinner. Instead, residents and businesses order groceries and personal items online through the store’s website; submit an order form via email, regular mail, phone, or fax; or shop in-store during a trip to one of Alaska’s hub cities.

For stores that offer online ordering, shopping isn’t much different than ordering through Amazon or a grocery store app.

“It works like any other e-commerce site that folks are familiar with,” White says. “You can browse the items and add them to your cart. Pretty much anything you’re going to find at any major store is processed through one easy online transaction.”

Order fulfillment varies by store. Greatland Grocery doesn’t have a physical location, so employees shop to fulfill orders much the same as Alaskans who don’t live in the Bush.

“We use the same resources that every other customer does and source from different retailers in town,” White explains. “Sometimes it’s physically going to the stores, but more often it’s trying to use [the store’s] own electronic resources, like [Pickup] or things like that. The system that we’ve built with our service syncs with theirs. It takes an existing system that they already have but customizes it specifically for our market.”

Stores with a physical location have dedicated employees to fulfill Bush orders. Fred Meyer, which only accepts orders via phone, fax, mail, or email, has a team of Alaska Bush Personal Shoppers who pull items from the shelves and prepare them for delivery. For in-store customers, the Bush delivery department packs and sends the order out for shipment.

Bailey’s handles Bush deliveries from its Anchorage and Fairbanks showrooms, with the majority of in-person orders coming from the Anchorage store.

“Anchorage is the hub for most of our ship out type stuff,” he explains. “I think people living in the Bush, they want to come to Anchorage anyway and they want to shop. And the biggest freight forwarders are based in Anchorage.”

While purchasing groceries is fairly straightforward—there’s no real risk of surprises when ordering a 10-pound package of ground beef or a gallon of milk—ordering household goods like furniture can be tricky. A customer’s number one priority when buying a bed or couch is whether it’s comfortable, something that’s hard to determine without being able to physically sit on or touch it before purchase.

“Our website is really good at visually showing the piece, but that’s one thing about buying off the web—you don’t get to touch it or feel it,” Bailey says. “It’s always a little disconcerting, especially if it’s a mattress or upholstery. If it’s a dining room table, it doesn’t matter.”

The forced closure of Bailey’s showrooms due to COVID-19 led employees to devise a 21st-century solution to alleviate some of those concerns.

“I’ll go in and see our guys walking around on Facetime with a customer, showing them the different choices live,” Bailey says. “So, there are definitely different ways of purchasing and feeling good about your purchase if you’re not in the store.”

Ordering groceries and personal items for Bush delivery is the easy part. Getting those items to their destination involves logistical considerations, not to mention added delivery costs, that don’t factor into the equation for those who can simply load purchases into a car and drive home.

Greatland Grocery has built the weight of every item into its ordering system so customers have a running tally of the order’s total cost and weight in their virtual cart.

“We’ve been able to attribute unit weights to all the stuff that we offer, so it’s possible to automate what shipping costs are going to be,” White says. “So, with that, we can offer air freight transactions if people want, we know what our USPS costs are going to be, and that makes it a bit more streamlined.”

Bailey’s provides the packaged weight and dimensions of every item it sells so Bush customers can accurately determine not just the shipping cost but whether the plane that will ultimately deliver the item can accommodate it.

“People in Anchorage, they want to know if it will fit on their wall,” Bailey says. “People in the Bush, they want to know that too, but they also want to know the shipping cost, so they get double dimensions.”

Whether an item is perishable also factors into how an order is packaged and delivered. Greatland Grocery’s system automatically categorizes goods as dry, frozen, or keep cool, White says. Fresh meat is frozen before shipping, and frozen and other perishable items are packed in lined plastic totes that essentially turn them into a cooler.

Greatland Grocery ships via USPS, which means that certain items require special handling.

“Aerosol can’t go through USPS, and there are other small things like vanilla extract, alcohol, some cleaning chemicals, and things like that,” White says. “We do sell them and offer them, [but] if you needed to buy this cleaning product that can’t be shipped USPS by regulation, it’ll be automatically put in air freight.”

Because large item returns are more difficult from the Bush, Bailey’s takes extra measures to ensure that every item is free of defects before shipping.

“We unbox every single item, inspect it, and make sure all the parts are there and that there’s no damage,” Bailey says. “Then we re-box it, add additional packaging as necessary, and send it to the freight forwarder of [the customer’s] choice.”

Delivering items to Bush customers quickly is a priority.

“We know that the people out in the Bush want to get their stuff as quick as they can,” Bailey says. “We don’t hold on to it for two to three days; we just load it up and get it out to them. Honestly, we go to the airport every single day of the year.”

Greatland Grocery works to get its orders sourced and shipped the same day whenever possible, White says, and usually gets them out within two days. For perishable orders submitted late in the week, White sometimes doesn’t fulfill the order until the following Monday to avoid having it sit at the post office an extra day, but he says that is rare.

According to Fred Meyer’s website, all of its Bush orders are shipped within 72 hours, with weekend orders shipped on Tuesday.

The majority of Bush deliveries are shipped air-freight via the carrier of the customer’s choice. Downline carriers typically deliver the shipment from the hub community to the Bush, although customers can request that a specific company deliver the goods all or part of the way instead.

“If you were in Anchorage, you could put 385 pounds of groceries on Alaska Airlines or Northern Air Cargo and tell them to call Arctic Backcountry when it gets to Kotzebue and he’ll move it to Noorvik,” Sieh says. “If people make a Bush order, and they specifically want me to do it, they can do it that way.”

Tony Bannock, office manager for Regal Air, says the charter company typically delivers groceries to remote lodges or directly to the customer’s cabin.

“People will ask us, ‘How far do you go?’ The answer is, if you write a big enough check, we’ll go anywhere because we charge by the hour,” he says with a laugh. “Most of our stuff is off-airport, so we can pretty much go anywhere in the state of Alaska. But it’s usually about 100 miles around Anchorage, mostly to the west and northwest.”

Greatland Grocery ships most of its orders via USPS, which White says has worked well.

“I got to say, those guys are phenomenal,” he says. “We routinely have orders that go out to rural Alaska to the post office and someone’s collecting from their post office within eighteen hours.”

It’s not just individuals who rely on Bush delivery.

“I haul food for the Northwest Arctic Borough School District, so I hit ten villages a week,” Sieh says. “I deliver all the freeze and produce for all the schools when they’re in session. The Arctic Slope Regional Corporation’s up in Kivalina, so I’ll fly parts in there.”

Bush pilots are especially vital when companies run the risk of operational interruptions if they don’t receive a certain piece of equipment or part quickly.

“Cruz Construction was up [in Kiana] building a runway, and I did a Goldstreak every night for two weeks straight,” Sieh says. “They need it; they’re doing a job—that’s kind of my specialty.”

When several trips are required to deliver an order, Bannock says Bush pilots carefully consider how to deliver the goods to ensure that if a delay occurs, customers don’t find themselves fully stocked with one essential and not another.

“A lodge owner will come in, especially for the spring ship, and they’ll literally buy $20,000 worth of paper towels, soda pop, beer, steaks, chicken, everything you can possibly think of,” he says. “You just kind of divvy it up [over several flights] so they got a little bit of everything to get them started.’”

Bush deliveries happen year-round, although their frequency may change seasonally.

“In the summer it’s every single day we’re hauling groceries somewhere,” Bannock says. “Somebody’s cabin, somebody’s fishing camp, somebody’s oil operations, somebody’s homestead. Every day we have a Costco box going somewhere. Once the summer season is over, a lot of the time we’ll do a huge couple of grocery hauls to the lodges that have pulled out but still have caretakers. We’ll do a Beaver load of groceries to keep them until December.”

The season also factors into how Bush pilots decide which items to deliver first.

“In the summertime, we try to get the produce and frozen stuff out first,” Bannock says. “That way it gets into their freezer and we’re not liable. In the wintertime, then we want to get the canned food and soda pop out because that stuff’s going to freeze.”

Although it sounds exciting, Bannock says the reality of Bush delivery is typically anything but.

“It’s really just like loading your truck up with groceries and taking them home, but you’re using airplanes,” he says. “It’s usually pretty boring, and that’s how we like it.”