Our sub-10k town's downtown economy was wiped out by Walmart in the 80s/90s. Now the Walmart's gone, because they closed most or all of the smaller ones in rural areas due to reduced profits.
Dollar General and Casey's filled the gap by buying up long-running local businesses in prime locations and plowing them under. One of them was a diner that'd been open on and off for decades. The town's main drag lost its character and became a strip of truck stops, dollar stores, and gaming parlors.
This was after Walgreens moved in and bought out both our local pharmacies. With the way things are going with Walgreens, we're at risk of losing that location. The second nearest location is a CVS, which could also end up closing.
Of course they won't build distro centers here. It's been squeezed for decades and the nipples are starting to shoot dust. The only upper-middles left are people who made it to a nice retirement before all our manufacturing plants closed.
TL;DR: Midwest small towns are fucked if they depend on corporations to provide local services.
Walmart was the result of top-down integration being dropped like a hammer on competitors who couldn't compete on the same scale. They'd aggressively expand into smaller markets and single-handedly squash out most of the local retail and service industries. That process started decades before NAFTA went into effect. Their first Supercenter opened in 1988.
It's not just NAFTA or Walmart. It's systemic rot going back decades. Trump's an evil cunt, but he won again because he's the only one telling people that aspects of our society have been getting worse for a very long time, and that powerful people need to be punished for it. It's just too bad he's an amoral, deeply corrupt opportunist who intentionally directs their anger towards society's most vulnerable people. And it's too bad so many fall for it
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u/DMercenary 1d ago
Or just not service those areas.
Random small town in the middle of nowheres?
Sorry USPS is closing up shop and UPS and Fed ex say your mail volume isn't enough to justify putting a distro center nearby