Once the local competition got pushed out, did Walmart raise prices or did they keep them low? Because if they kept low prices, I'm not sure I see the problem here.

How do these towns even exist if there are no jobs? One guy talks about a collection of 100+ guns(from my understanding guns are worth quite a chunk of money if well maintained)

This story makes no sense to me, just sounds like a town where people don't want to leave and have no incentive to stay.

The only sane person is the one who started sustenance farming - that's the way to go if you want to live in the middle of nowhere.

Anyone living actually out in the country has already been driving 30-60min each way a couple times a month for "major shopping" including groceries, and maybe gardening or raising some livestock to supplement that if they're so inclined. The folks in these marginal towns are just getting introduced to that way of life, I guess, and that's the story here? If they don't like it... well, sorry, but it costs a lot more to get groceries at small volumes out to little, remote towns, so unless your town grows a bunch (unlikely) people are gonna keep driving farther away for better prices, killing new stores that try to start up, just as TFA describes. Start living like a real Country Person or move to where the grocery stores (that everyone actually wants to shop at, apparently) are.

Exactly. Small town grocery stores have significantly higher prices and lower selection than in bigger places. So it turns out that the people with cars only use the local grocery store for perishables/emergency shopping trips and do their grocery stock-up trips in bigger places.

These towns exist because they used to have jobs. Then those jobs dried up due to manufacturing leaving, companies dying and so forth.

These people can't up and leave because their homes are worth very little and they don't have the money or skills to pivot to anything new. So what else is there for them to do but nothing?

That's the reality of many small towns in America.

It's starkly obvious in New England outside the orbit of Boston. In the 90s, there were still many, many shoe shops, textile mills, clothing manufacturers, furniture shops and lumber and paper mills. And around those businesses were a whole constellation of other support industries. When the mills got outsourced to China, or Bangladesh or Mexico, everything else went down like dominos, and there's nothing left; in my hometown, people are struggling to hold on, with the school district, a small local university, the regional hospital, a ski resort, and yes, the Walmart, as the only large employers left. Nobody who gets an education ever comes back, so what's left is a shrinking, greying population.

Going back further in time, agriculture was once tenable, but refrigeration and processed foods largely killed the regional market, and trying to farm rocks in New England is much less efficient than doing so in the Central Valley or the Midwest.

There are jobs, but only so many. The farmers need mechanics to work on their tractors; salesmen for seed, fertilizer, and equipment; teachers for their kids; and all the other things that you need in life. However they only need so many. Farmers have discovered that with bigger equipment they don't need as many people to get the job done, and so there is a surplus of people who don't have a job in rural areas and can't get one.

However if you - you personally - have a useful skill that is needed you can get a well paying job in any of those towns and buy a nice house for under $100k - next door to someone who isn't stupid but has no job or opportunity to get a job because he doesn't have the skills needed or the "drive" to get those skills. If they all did some would have to leave town anyway because there are more people than jobs.

There is a lot of money in small towns - thus the 100 gun collection. However it belongs those who earned (or inherited) it long ago. Perhaps they sold the family farm for a few million. Perhaps they sold their small factory to a big company that closed it down. Maybe they still have a small factory and earn a nice income from it while paying 10 employees a nice for the area wage.

Those evil corporations offering consumers lower prices and better selection!!

They need to stop hurting consumers!!

Is that really the only response you have to large corporations artificially lowering prices to brute force local markets?

What next, are you going to defend regional monopolies by ISPs because consumers should just choose a different ISP?

With Walmart, it seems like they lowered prices because people prefer lower prices. Is there evidence they did it to brute force local markets, or is that your interpretation of the facts?

If you’re goal is to stop competition and keep prices higher, then yes we should stop Walmart.

I for one don’t want that.

You're saying that we shouldn't stop Walmart monopolies because it would stifle competition?

The proof is in the fact that Walmart has came to many smaller towns and wiped out local competition due to size and economy of scale. The only companies that can compete is ones at similar scale while local businesses go bankrupt and money is drained out of the community.

When did free market economics turn into support for massive monopolies and allowing single corporations to control entire markets?

What "higher quality" stores? Have you ever been to little mom-n-pop shops in the days before Walmart? They were generally pretty terrible: the prices were high, the service wasn't very good (they didn't have liberal return policies), they might even be rude to you, and the selection was absolutely terrible. How is that "higher quality"?

You seem to have some naive idea image of quaint little small towns in the "old days" where everything was great until big, bad Walmart showed up. It wasn't like that at all. Go read about "company towns" and "company stores", where there was only one store in the town, that was the only place where the local workers could shop because they got paid in "scrip" instead of real money, and where the prices were terribly high, effectively making them all indentured servants.

>You're literally placing the fate of entire towns in the hands of a single company with a de-facto monopoly.

These little towns generally had monopolies anyway. They weren't big enough to support multiple stores of the same type.

The bottom line is that these towns just aren't economically viable any more. They need to just shut down, and the people in them need to be relocated.

I don't disagree, but were they always like that, or more so as the proprietors faced increasing cost pressures and competition, and became jaded?

No, they were always like this, because they could be. Take off the rose-tinted glasses; everything wasn't quaint and wonderful in "the old days". Those were the days when those wonderful mom-n-pop shops would refuse service to black people, for instance.