FOUR STATE AREA — Being located in the center of the country and having highway access in all four directions, makes Missouri in general, and Joplin in particular, a good location when it comes to selling products.
And sales of one type of product are exploding as a result.
Every year at this time, Grand Lake resident Mike Fry makes an annual pilgrimage to one of the Black Market Fireworks stores in Joplin, this one just across the road the Petro Truck Stop.
Mike Fry, Oklahoma Resident, said, “Coming up here to buy our provisions and our fireworks for oh probably 30 years.”
And he’s not alone, according to the website Zippia, per capita the state of Missouri and nearby Kansas rank number one and number three respectively when it comes to fireworks sales national wide.
And Black Market Fireworks Store Manager Larry Shelley isn’t at all surprised with that.
And part of it is location, location, location.
Larry Shelley, Store Manger, Black Market Fireworks, said, “Really from all over the country because we have truck drivers, we have people traveling on vacation that will stop in uh and they’re coming everywhere from California to Connecticut, I mean from coast to coast basically.”
“There are fireworks at this store for pretty much any occasion, including gender reveals.”
And even though Missouri residents can only by fireworks at this store during specific times during the year, he says people from outside the show-me state can shop here year round.
And Fry says many of the products he can get here, have been outlawed in his home states.
Mike Fry, Oklahoma Resident, said, “You can get bottle rockets up here, everything else, the thing of it is it’s priced well, and I think that’s that’s the reason we come up, take a look, make the road trip and get a big bang out of it.”
If you’d like to see the entire list, which includes the ranking for Arkansas and Oklahoma, follow the link below.
https://www.zippia.com/advice/exploding-indepence-day-states-use-fireworks/
