Last year a spate of articles appeared about how grocery stores had bailed out of small-town/rural America, leaving maybe a Dollar General or something. For years, we've heard about telecom monopolies providing less than realistic service to small-town/rural America. Remember all the hand-wringing over a "digital divide"?
1. Isn't this just market forces at work? Since we're all free market fundamentalists, why does this bother us? 2. This is the result of deregulation, unchecked consolidation, and the populace migrating to cities. Monopolies, or even firms with a lot of monopoly power in oligopolistic markets don't have to meet every need, they just need to keep turning what they consider as an obscene profit. This strikes me as a 2nd order effect of allowing banks to consolidate. 3. Small and medium towns are losing population as well, and may be on the bubble for this sort of thing as well. 4. There's certainly an outsized amount of hand-wringing over the fate of rural America. I'm going to guess that there are urban areas with vastly greater population, that have much the same problems. Don't we usually agree that 15% of Americans are un-banked? This seems like an "electoral college" for concern about rural Americans.