Sounds like they are getting exactly what they wanted?
Reminds me of folks in SF who bemoan the loss of a local butcher store. Sure, they may like buying organic cuts of meat at $15/lb, but it's obviously most people don't, that's why those stores went out of business.
There are lots of things worth talking about here. The way low incomes push people towards unhealthy diets to save money. The tradeoff between lower prices at chains, and more money leaving the community. The loss of indirect social benefits which don't show up on a balance sheet. Even the physical and mental effects of more time spent driving.
But reducing the discussion to "the town needs a grocery store to open" misses all of the most interesting questions.
There's a reason people who live "10 miles from anything" absolutely hate rising gas prices, though. If you commute 20 miles a day for $25k/year, an extra $3/gallon would eat about a week's pay just getting to and from work.
If someone grows up with poor education in an economically stagnant area, their likely minimum-wage severely limits the freedom to choose. Surplus unskilled labor translates to downward pressure on wages which implies the same for goods on the market - it's a nasty feedback loop that undercuts the local economy.
They had every choice to keep spending their dollars at their local grocer. And they decided not to.
Nobody killed the local grocer except for consumers.
Consumers killed the middle class. Sometime, somewhere, someone walked into a store and saw a Philco radio made in Pennsylvania by unionized middle-class manufacturing workers and a cheap Japanese/Tawianese copy of the radio and bought the cheap radio.
Sometime, somewhere, someone saw a mailer from Walmart and saw that they had eggs for 98 cents a dozen instead of the 99 cents a dozen at the local grocer, where the employees were unionized and fairly paid, and they went to Walmart instead.
The same thing happened with air travel. People complain about poor service but the vast majority only ever sort by price and click on the "race to the bottom" fare that shows up first. And then they complain about being nickel-and-dimed.
Now the malls are dying and people are blaming Amazon for physical retail centers turning into ghost towns and eyesores. No shit Sherlock, when you buy everything on Amazon you go to the mall less often and the stores start turning into physical manifestations of the stuff you can get on aliexpress, or they close the doors completely.
If people spent 1% of the time they spend complaining about Walmart into shopping conscientiously, there would be a butcher closer than one hour away from my house and I could support a small local business, paying more in exchange for ensuring a higher quality of life for me and my neighbors.
But I can't because sometime, somewhere, in the past, someone went to Walmart and saw floor-scraping ground beef for 95% the price of the butcher and started getting meat at Walmart, so the butcher locked his doors.
As soon as any portion of the above is invalidated it's time to have a strongly regulated market, rather than just a lightly regulated one (the fair part).
You can't have such a lopsided system and expect it to survive.
If we're talking about food stores and food producers, same thing. The large corporations receive the subsidies from the government to produce the crops, and the large retailers control the market for those crops.
It's also ironic because we blame Walmart for killing the local grocery store (Ingles, PigglyWiggly, Winn Dixie) -- but ignore that they first took down the corner produce store, butcher, etc.
You can cry that Walmart killed the town square, but when pushes comes to shoves consumers value lower prices and greater variety.
Being employed by a small business owner you know face to face probably has some social benefits over being indirectly employed and controlled by some fabulously wealthy out-of-state people you've never met. I'm not sure it's good for the material prosperity of the employees.
I think that stories about "big chain retailers devastating small towns" often confuse weakened community feeling with economic unfairness. Sam the local grocer was not economically great for his employees or customers. He never had the economies of scale to offer high wages or low prices. But Sam was part of the community in a way that the Walmart board and CEO can't be.
A smaller business, as you said, has social advantages, but they're likely to be flakier, limited recourse if there's an HR issue, etc.
Walmart came in and drastically slashed prices on groceries because they had the size, money and infrastructure to cheaply move goods around. This was intentional behavior to kill local grocery stores and it worked, because consumers in these areas tend to be poorer and will shop at places that save them the most money. This is intentional behavior abused by Walmart to intentionally push out competition.
Local grocery stores can't compete because they literally cannot drop prices without going bankrupt. So they end up dying, leaving Walmart as the de-facto local Monopoly.
And then when Walmart decided to pack its bags, the town is devastated because they relied on it for everything [1]. At the very least educate yourself a bit on the way Walmart operates.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/09/what-happene...
This story makes no sense to me, just sounds like a town where people don't want to leave and have no incentive to stay.
The only sane person is the one who started sustenance farming - that's the way to go if you want to live in the middle of nowhere.
These people can't up and leave because their homes are worth very little and they don't have the money or skills to pivot to anything new. So what else is there for them to do but nothing?
That's the reality of many small towns in America.
Going back further in time, agriculture was once tenable, but refrigeration and processed foods largely killed the regional market, and trying to farm rocks in New England is much less efficient than doing so in the Central Valley or the Midwest.
However if you - you personally - have a useful skill that is needed you can get a well paying job in any of those towns and buy a nice house for under $100k - next door to someone who isn't stupid but has no job or opportunity to get a job because he doesn't have the skills needed or the "drive" to get those skills. If they all did some would have to leave town anyway because there are more people than jobs.
There is a lot of money in small towns - thus the 100 gun collection. However it belongs those who earned (or inherited) it long ago. Perhaps they sold the family farm for a few million. Perhaps they sold their small factory to a big company that closed it down. Maybe they still have a small factory and earn a nice income from it while paying 10 employees a nice for the area wage.
They need to stop hurting consumers!!
What next, are you going to defend regional monopolies by ISPs because consumers should just choose a different ISP?
I for one don’t want that.
You seem to have some naive idea image of quaint little small towns in the "old days" where everything was great until big, bad Walmart showed up. It wasn't like that at all. Go read about "company towns" and "company stores", where there was only one store in the town, that was the only place where the local workers could shop because they got paid in "scrip" instead of real money, and where the prices were terribly high, effectively making them all indentured servants.
>You're literally placing the fate of entire towns in the hands of a single company with a de-facto monopoly.
These little towns generally had monopolies anyway. They weren't big enough to support multiple stores of the same type.
The bottom line is that these towns just aren't economically viable any more. They need to just shut down, and the people in them need to be relocated.
The proof is in the fact that Walmart has came to many smaller towns and wiped out local competition due to size and economy of scale. The only companies that can compete is ones at similar scale while local businesses go bankrupt and money is drained out of the community.
When did free market economics turn into support for massive monopolies and allowing single corporations to control entire markets?
Perhaps they still wanted fresh produce too, but because they weren't buying enough, the result was that couldn't buy any.
People are not good at predicting long term effects of their purchasing decisions. This had been a trend for the last 20 years: Walmart comes in, local businesses close down. But no one said the people are happy. The issue is the people need to coordinate their purchases to get what they actually want.
Supposedly, Walmart fresh produce and meat is more locally sourced than the chain grocery stores. Because Walmart focuses on supply chain costs and order in larger quantities, they order more food from the region than anybody else.
Sometimes, what you want in the short-term is not what's good for you in the long-term.
Your attitude is just the old paternalistic "You're too stupid to know what's best for you, so I'm going to force you to make the right decision for you."
Thank god we don't live in a country where that's broadly supported.
The point that I am making is that platitudes about 'The people asked for it, now they got it, therefore we have optimized overall good' are poor arguments. Satisfying wants don't always result in locally, or globally optimal outcomes.
Take the Walmart pushing small local grocers out of business as a case study. Suppose there's a valley consisting of about 3 or 4 small towns spread out about 10 miles apart in a big chain. The locals for each town each go to the local grocery store to buy food. When a Walmart opens in town 3 of 4, many locals from towns 1, 2, and 4 also start going to town 3 to shop for groceries because they can buy in bulk. But it's a relatively expensive trip for many people in towns 1 and 2. And the lack of custom from the more wealthy citizens in those towns means the local grocery stores go out of business in all the towns in the valley, and Walmart becomes the only game in the entire valley allowing them to set prices however they choose.
Do you think it's a good idea to make poorer people in towns 1, 2, and 4 drive an additional 10 miles out of their way to buy groceries, when many of them couldn't afford to drive to town 3 regularly in the first place? Isn't that a kind of impingement on their freedom to buy groceries as they choose? What kind of lifestyle changes might that cause if buying groceries becomes more of a hardship than it used to be?
Excluding brief mentions of business consolidation and state tax credits, there's almost no engagement with why the problem got started or what will be different the second time around. If we want to look at why the heroin addict got started, that would probably involve aging rural populations, rural young adults leaving for cities, lower rural labor force participation, and higher marginal costs in remote areas. Community markets don't reverse any of those patterns except maybe young adults moving away, and co-op ownership doesn't escape the fundamental question of whether rural grocery stories can cover costs at competitive prices. Reopening a grocery store is an early step towards renewal, but it's framed like the main challenge.
If there's nothing in an area to give you income besides a single unknowable unexciting corporate employer, people will move away.
A local butcher shop takes up a tiny amount of area, and therefore a tiny amount of infrastructure. It pays way more in taxes than Wal-Mart, compared to the amount it costs the city to support.
This is a central part of the strong towns message, about why our towns and cities are all going broke: https://youtu.be/K0AZXUWr_Rg?t=3723