edit: that is not to say opening big supermarkets is great, just that once they are there that's why people skip local stores and go to the big supermarket
I guess what Americans are missing from how smaller towns work in other countries is that they tend to be more dense, with more mixed zoning. Not as overfilled with way too big parking lots, way too wide “stroads”, and endless suburban sprawl. So the trip to town is shorter/faster, you go into town more often, for more different kinds of activities, and so you don’t have to buy everything all at once.
Take a look at the Strong Town initiative and the YouTube channel “not just bikes”.
Being in town - to me - is a part of living life. It’s where you’d have a third place, where you’d do various activities, meet people and discover new things. If you’ve felt the need to optimise your life to maximise your time at work and in your house.. that feels really sad to me.
Well I'm not american and I lived in village and in small town. If I have supermarket in "range" I will go to supermarket, choice is bigger and prices are lower.
Sure, if I have store nearby and want to get an icecream or something, or forgot to buy something on weekly shopping trip I'd buy it there.
> Being in town - to me - is a part of living life. It’s where you’d have a third place, where you’d do various activities, meet people and discover new things.
...when going on grocery shopping ? And for some reason you're prevented from speaking to people in supermarket ?
> If you’ve felt the need to optimise your life to maximise your time at work and in your house.. that feels really sad to me.
I dunno from which arse you've got that conclusion. Do you have nothing more interesting to do in your life than going around shopping ?
Groceries are chore not a fucking adventure, regardless of shop size. And saving money means I can spend it on things I actually enjoy and places I actually want to go to.
Probably, I live in a California Suburb. There really is no such thing as "walkable" here in the same way some older eastern US cities and other countries have them.
>Being in town - to me - is a part of living life. It’s where you’d have a third place, where you’d do various activities, meet people and discover new things.
Yeah, that doesn't exist here. We don't really have a "community" in my town. Or perhaps I'm too old and too young for that part of community. No kids to bring to activities but way too old to simply show up for "community activities".
>If you’ve felt the need to optimise your life to maximise your time at work and in your house.. that feels really sad to me.
well the cool thing about land in the US is that it's also huge. I'm in a 1600 ft house, so if you have friends it's great for arranging get togethers and house parties.
Instead. You get to enjoy one corporation, that does anything it wants, pays horribly, employees have no choice, you have no choice in what garbage you buy. And your downtown now consists of 8 banks.
Yup. You're living the dream!
Walmart: Everstart $180, 4 year "free replacement" warranty.
Napa: house brand $250, Odyssey $371 (both 3 yr warranty)
OReilly: house brand $250, Optima $290 (both 3 yr warranty)
AutoZone: house brand $250, Optima $290 (both 3 yr warranty)
Yes, Walmart is evil./s
You're lucky to have a dedicated bakery that actually makes bread, or maybe you just live in a big city? There's probably twenty bakeries in my midsize city, but they all bake cakes, muffins, confectioneries, and whatnot. None of them actually bake bread.
Walmart bread is truly awful, with the only thing going for it being that it's cheap and consistent. My preferred choice in my area is the sourdough bread from Aldi, which at least only has the ingredients that bread should have, with no sugar or soybean oil or other junk.
Walmart is the extreme end of satisfying consumers above all else. Customers get a single, climate-controlled location to take care of nearly all their shopping, with good prices; but it comes at the expense of the employees, local community, and factory workers. Unfortunately, most customers don't know or care about those downsides because the experience is catered so heavily for them, and it's hard to get people to sacrifice material comfort for benefits that appear so abstract.
That does not follow. Small stores carry the same shit as big chain stores. Because of their smaller scale and more limited purchasing power those items are more expensive than a chain and they can only afford to carry high throughput items. The only way small stores can deal with long tail items is if they're super specialty and neat a large enough metro area to have enough sales to survive.
I'm not saying small stores are bad but there's a decided small store tax. Without economies of scale they have a very hard time competing against chains. They have an even harder time competing against online sales.
Not always. Go to a dedicated board game store and you'll see such a wider variety than the branded Monopoly sets on sale at big box stores. Plus they usually have an area dedicated to actually playing games, something you'll never find at a chain. This community charm is paid for by the small store tax, but the benefits far outweigh the cost.
Stores like Target carry far more board games than just branded copies of Monopoly. Shit they sell Cards Against Humanity at Target. Barnes & Noble carries and even wider selection of board games and pen and paper role playing games. So big chains are definitely not limited to Monopoly.
While small game stores can carry a wider selection than big chains, most make their nut selling the bigger brand games or toys. There might be Black Swan stores able to specialize in Ticket to Ride or Carcasone expansions but that's not the common case.
I know the owners of quite a few small game stores. They are to a store struggling to keep the lights on because their costs are butting right up against their revenue. Charm is great and all but it doesn't pay the bills.
Again I'm not arguing against small shops but there's not much they offer above and beyond what can be found in big chains or online. The things they can offer, like a game play space, aren't easy or even possible to monetize.
They open multiple Walmart's, the small town stores go out of business, then they can close some percentage of the Walmart's to consolidate into a few stores in central locations, now all of the small town people have to drive farther to get anything at all. And the small town dies.
The main benefit of small towns is that social capital matters and reputation matters. Of course those are disadvantages to misbehavers.
This is something that many young adults have forgotten, because it's increasingly more trendy to move around a lot in your 20s while developing your career. Nobody cares in a big city if you're an asshole, because there's a million other people to associate with and most likely the asshole and everyone around them aren't going to still be there in five years.
The downside of the small town social setting is that it can be cliquey.
Come to think of it, in my own county, which is not highly urban by any stretch of the imagination, you'd be maximum a half-hour drive away from the nearest DMV starting from any main road. Obviously, that doesn't hold if it takes you 15 minutes to get down your own driveway ;-)
I could easily see some of the much more remote Western small towns being further away from anything.
But not all towns are like that.
It is _incredible_ the difference it makes on town culture, and _how much better it was_
Not all small towns have a major research university or other dependable benefactor around - most of the small town representatives can easily be bought/bribed by a major chain.
A small college town with a reputation of rich kids going to it is probably going to have an outlier amount of single people with extra money to throw around little shops. If they have families and start budgeting, they will be off to Costco and Walmart and Target to save money like the bulk of the US.
The actual town, I think, survives on the individual shop mentality because the physical layout of the town. The Ithaca town square is physically designed to be the physcial, social and cultural center of the town, which allows the shops there an advantage of being a center of the community, completely surrounded on all sides by walkable residential living. This gives them a competitive advantage, that lets them compete with the bigger box stores which require taking a bus or car a few minutes downtown to arrive at.
Chapel Hill, NC has a Target smack dab in the middle of downtown, and everyone would agree that it's an idyllic college town with a wonderful culture.
I guess technically, if a store can't be re-started today is kind of like also saying, if the small town can't re-start itself, then that points to question, why would a small town need to exist at all today.
Think the end of this line of reasoning is that small towns have no reason to exist, so let them go?
Correct.
Walking more is better for your health. Or are you saying you walk too much already?
Just because there are 8 stores doesn't mean that everyone has to use all 8 of them. It does mean that anyone could use any of them. Sounds like a win to me.
In the end, consumers get to choose to support Walmart exclusively or to support a variety of businesses. Walmart doesn't get to make that choice. If you are unhappy with the outcome, is it right to blame Walmart?
to be fair, the people did choose. I know it's out of vogue to blame the general populace for the actions of coporations, but at the end of the day corps can do this because it works. Every single time.
Not sure if anything can be done, but I think it's also worth considering WHY people don't consider much past their immediate convenience when shopping.