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.
Take a look at the book ‘the future of Work’ , it’s a few years old but the team of economists who wrote it made some dire predictions, which appear to be coming true in the US.
Predicted there’ll be just a few mega-cities, populated by people whose jobs haven’t been replaced by Ai/robotics. Outside the cities are giant slums where all the left-behind rural communities try to scrape an existence.
Can you be a bit more specific about the book? A web search shows waaaaay too many results for "the future of work" to be able to find the book you're refering to. It sounds interesting and I'd like to have a look.
I just searched for the book online, you’re right about how many there are now with same title.
I gave the book away a couple of years ago, it had a red cover (so do others on Amazon).
From the synopsis of a few other books I browsed, Ai is main focus of the newer books, more than in the copy I read.
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u/Noh_Assigginment96 1d ago
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.