This kind of thing makes me sad WRT the realities of modern life. Why is it that when we think "Oh we lack local shops for basic food stuffs" that we think, "We need to entice multi-billion dollar operations into this area to service our poor people".

What about, "We need local people to open up local mom & pop stores"? Why can't we think, "We need to provide incentives, education and security for local people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and service themselves" instead of "We need to find a way to funnel money from poor people to rich people"?

I totally understand that I'm misrepresenting the actual thinking going on here :-). People in the west are so far removed from traditional ways of doing things that they think that the only way to buy food is to have a 2 acre parking lot for minivans and a stadium sized store with razor thin margins selling pre-packaged food.

Around the world, poor people start small stores and sell things to other poor people. People walk to the store because they don't own cars. They carry their food for today because they don't own refrigerators. And it's definitely not as efficient, but it keeps the money local.