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Comment by 0xffff2 | Hacker News Reader

I think the mere fact that I split my time between the Bay Area and rural Oregon, yet never feel compelled to shop an Walmart comes close to disproving the physical retail monopoly argument. The nearest town to my house in Orgeon has a Dollar General, but it also has two local convenience stores that sell some staple groceries. Prices are high enough that I usually drive down to the nearest city, where I have nearly all the same retail options I have in the Bay Area (and more, if I need anything resembling farm supplies).

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You don’t sound like the representative example of most consumers in most communities in America.

Dollar General has over 15,000 stores and most are in towns of less than 20,000 people. [1] I think perhaps you're assuming too much and working off incomplete or obsolete information.

1: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

Dollars stores sell a subset of products not the full A-Z Thst amazon and Walmart specifically target. Small towns used to have a fabric store, a butcher, a florist, toy stores, auto parts. The list goes on. Walmart sells it all, often with no real competition, the dollar store does not sell all of those items.

It's true that it does not sell all the items Walmart does, but it does point towards Walmart having not quite as much of a physical space monopoly as you presented.

It also points towards the ability of other companies to compete with Walmart in niche areas (at least niche compared to Walmart). I could see a future where a few chains each carve out a chunk of the more popular Walmart inventory and out-compete Walmart on physical location, as Dollar General has done.

You can kind of imagine them as CPU cache layers. In-town local stores are L1 cache with great speed but relatively poor choice for all but the most common items, Walmart is L2 cache with good speed (not still slower for most, as it's a ways away for the majority of people) and better selection, and the internet is general memory with everything you might need, but slow speed. There has been a major upheaval in the L! level because of both a major shift in how close/fast and large L2 got (a shift from major cities to large complexes in rural areas) and a huge boost in general access (the internet), but I don't think it's all played out yet, since I think there's still need at the local level that's not fulfilled well anymore.

Sorry for the tortured analogy, but it did probably save time on both ends.

Really? Where are most consumers living then? I think I'm in the unusual situation of seeing both sides of the urban/rural divide in a way that most people don't. The fact that I split my time between a major metropolitan area and a town that's only just starting to recover from the local sawmill closing a couple decades ago probably puts me a lot closer to the mean than most people.

Your metropolitan area is not representative of other metropolitan areas. Most of population is clustered around cities that are not comparable to SF and it’s surroundings, economically and culture wise.

Oregon is also notoriously unlike other states. In Utah, for example, if there is a big store in a small town, it's most likely a Walmart. In the town where I grew up, there were other options further away, but Walmart there now often has better and more diverse produce than several of the supposedly nicer chain supermarkets in SF.

West coast experience does not match the rest of the country. Outside the largest cities and wealthy suburbs, you’d be hard pressed. Especially on an average salary.

I think a town 40 miles outside of Klamath Falls, Oregon qualifies as "outside the largest cities and wealthy suburbs".

Eastern or western Oregon? The former is much more walmart-ish than the latter.

Central/Eastern. Klamath Falls is where I usually do my shopping.

I stopped at Klamath Falls once on the way to crater lake, even went to a dollar store there for some reason.

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