If you live in remote parts of Alaska, your shopping options are limited: either you are shopping at the local village store, which may have limited selection and high prices, or you are ordering from a Wal-Mart or Fred Meyer 400 miles away:

Local prices are so high and inventory so sparse that Seitz, like many Alaskans living far from the road system, buys nearly all her food and household staples from big-box chain stores in cities hundreds of miles away.

At least once a month, she sends her shopping list to Safeway in Fairbanks and pays a small airline to fly her groceries across 300 roadless miles to the Athabascan Indian village of 100 people on the banks of the Yukon River.

The business generated by such customers is impossible to quantify, but it’s big enough that several stores, including Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Best Buy, devote whole mail-order departments to more than 200,000 rural residents spread over an area twice the size of Texas.

This is a very interesting way for these large retailers to provide a solution for a unique situation.

More from CNN: Bush mail brings big-box stores to Alaska’s hinterlands