Huh? At some point in time these people had $X. They decided that it was better for them to shop at Walmart versus their local grocer. Is this surprising? No. Walmart offers better selection and prices. Economy of scale plays a big part in that.

They had every choice to keep spending their dollars at their local grocer. And they decided not to.

The never-ending blame-shifting has to stop.

Nobody killed the local grocer except for consumers.

Consumers killed the middle class. Sometime, somewhere, someone walked into a store and saw a Philco radio made in Pennsylvania by unionized middle-class manufacturing workers and a cheap Japanese/Tawianese copy of the radio and bought the cheap radio.

Sometime, somewhere, someone saw a mailer from Walmart and saw that they had eggs for 98 cents a dozen instead of the 99 cents a dozen at the local grocer, where the employees were unionized and fairly paid, and they went to Walmart instead.

The same thing happened with air travel. People complain about poor service but the vast majority only ever sort by price and click on the "race to the bottom" fare that shows up first. And then they complain about being nickel-and-dimed.

Now the malls are dying and people are blaming Amazon for physical retail centers turning into ghost towns and eyesores. No shit Sherlock, when you buy everything on Amazon you go to the mall less often and the stores start turning into physical manifestations of the stuff you can get on aliexpress, or they close the doors completely.

If people spent 1% of the time they spend complaining about Walmart into shopping conscientiously, there would be a butcher closer than one hour away from my house and I could support a small local business, paying more in exchange for ensuring a higher quality of life for me and my neighbors.

But I can't because sometime, somewhere, in the past, someone went to Walmart and saw floor-scraping ground beef for 95% the price of the butcher and started getting meat at Walmart, so the butcher locked his doors.

It's ironic that this comment and the article blame Walmart so much, because Walmarts are often serving the most local produce because they have focused on the supply chain (local fresh food lasts longer than shipped fresh food and costs less to ship)

It's also ironic because we blame Walmart for killing the local grocery store (Ingles, PigglyWiggly, Winn Dixie) -- but ignore that they first took down the corner produce store, butcher, etc.

Competition only works for similarly sized players in a fair market.

As soon as any portion of the above is invalidated it's time to have a strongly regulated market, rather than just a lightly regulated one (the fair part).

Importing goods from countries that have no environmental regulations, literal slave labor, little-to-no tariffs is what drove the local stores out of business.

You can't have such a lopsided system and expect it to survive.

If we're talking about food stores and food producers, same thing. The large corporations receive the subsidies from the government to produce the crops, and the large retailers control the market for those crops.

agreed. But there is also a more aggressive and hostile side of capitalism that is not necessarily consumer driven. As an example, Where I live (in Boston) 7-Eleven bought out and converted or simply closed pretty much all white hen pantry locations that they were competing with. 7-Eleven's quality, products, pricing and selection was far inferior and instead of competing, they simply threw money at the competition to dissapear. Nothing illegal or immoral with that, just that we are now stuck with a dirty 7-eleven in my neighborhood with no deli nor bakery. But plenty of lotto tickets and cigarettes.

The decision of how $X is spent is just part of the bigger picture... what is $X, why do people accept those wages, what options are actually available to them, and how does the presence of conglomerate importers influence the local economy in the long run? That's what I was alluding to.