This is the thing @lotsofpulp that everyone else seems to be missing. The amount of your income that is available to spend on goods after all of your other fixed expenditures. This has been so solidly tracked in terms of stagnant wages and applies to the SMB in the area as well.
Open a grocery and try to staff folks and have consistent supply of goods. Deal with shrinkage, spoilage and inefficient supply chains.
Meanwhile Wal-Mart (or other MNC) has a ton of capital, their employees are on social services and the cost of their goods for this town's store is in a negotiation of not one store but thousands.
People spend what they can. The middle class shows us this in their consumption of target over walmart and other such brand divides.
I find this point irrelevant. As other posters have posted, the local store could rarely pay above minimum wage. Walmart not only beats minimum wage, but has a rather extensive benefit plan. (The same can be said for McDonald's, Chipotle, ChickFilA, and Starbucks.)
Oh for sure, but stores focused on bringing high margin cheap imported goods and base minimum wage jobs into communities that formerly bought locally produced goods does not exactly help this problem. Dollar General's expansion would burn if the minimum wage were raised.
> communities that formerly bought locally produced goods
The communities I'm thinking of here never bought locally produced goods for most things. The communities set up along the railroads in the late 1800s never had enough of their own industry to make most things, and a lot of them in the Great Plains never had a climate fit to grow much beyond wheat and cattle. They owed their entire existence to the railroad, and the relatively lucky ones were able to transition to owing their entire existence to a highway when the rail industry bottomed out.
Revitalization of a rail network, especially commuter, could work for some of these. If you add a stop that's a 30 minute high speed (150 mile) rail away from 2 major cities, that town, and towns around it would boon.
That would be a pretty strong incentive for certain groups to oppose a minimum wage hike then. In my experience, a small town in the midwest is likely to have 1. A grocery store, 2. A hardware store, and 3. a Dollar General.
If you come along with a plan that is going to shutter one of the three remaining businesses where you can buy actual day to day goods, people aren't going to be too thrilled.
communities that formerly bought locally produced goods
How long has it been since these communities actually did that? Small towns can't really support the diversity of industry it takes to buy more local goods than shipped-in goods in a modern-day lifestyle.
Never for most of rural areas. By the time most towns in say Iowa were getting setup the industrial revolution was underway: the town wasn't making anything, the blacksmith was taking mass produced horseshoes and fitting them to the horse. What the town did produce (example: brooms...) wasn't for the town it was for the whole country.
The newspaper was produced for the town. Everything else was either services that can't be mass produced or the town was doing their own mass production for export.
> Sorry, by locally produced, I'm referring to (mostly) foodstuffs, additionally, local small retailers that were resellers.
A town in the Great Plains doesn't have a climate fit to make most foods locally, unless you call taking shipped-in ingredients and cooking them "making" food.
It certainly can (and did) make most food locally, it's just that it has to be different food - you eat what you can make from locally produced ingredient and don't eat what you can't. The type of food we eat has changed a lot, and the expectation to have "ethnic" food with products grown on another continent, or to have the same vegetables available year-round instead of them being seasonal - that's a relatively recent thing.
> It certainly can (and did) make most food locally, it's just that it has to be different food - you eat what you can make from locally produced ingredient and don't eat what you can't.
No. Not in eastern Montana. There are regions where you can't live off the land year-round like you think.
"After President Barack Obama expanded the program, limited-service convenience stores began moving into neighborhoods where low-income people already lived, in order to get some of the $68 billion spent through SNAP every year."
