I grew up in a small town in eastern Oklahoma in the '70s and early '80s.  There was already a dearth of businesses in the town of 2,700 then, but when Wal-Mart opened in a larger town fifteen miles away, it didn't take long for most of them to go out of business. 

From a purely selection-oriented perspective, our options increased in that Wal-Mart stocked several national brands of every product in addition to whole categories of products that the local IGA market didn't even carry.  From a competition perspective, of course, things worsened.  The general stores in all the surrounding towns were clobbered by Wal-Mart.  Who's going to buy a forty-dollar blender when it's less than half the price at WM?

In my opinion, this plight is as much self-inflicted as it is caused by external economic forces.  It takes awareness and the vigilance to actively vote with one's dollars to cultivate the kind of community you desire.  My partner and I seek to "keep it real" by buying our coffee from the local purveyor of fair-trade beans here in south Austin.  We don't have a lot of money -- though I'm sure many small-town residents would say otherwise (it's all relative) -- but this is important to us and we probably don't buy something else we would like so as to afford it.

It's largely about priorities.  I don't fully buy the idea that rural residents are without any economic wiggle room when it comes to choosing how to spend their money.  In my old hometown, I remember many of my classmates living in mobile homes surrounded by new trucks, Trans-Ams and bass boats.  Clearly, these highly depreciable luxuries were their priority. Our family lived in a brick house and drove an old Dodge Polara, one that saw many thousands of miles driving on tent camping trips throughout the national parks of the American West.  My mother was a public school teacher and, before he got a better job on the railroad, my father was a janitor.  We didn't have any more money than the mobile home/bass boat set.

Small towns are also, consciously or not, insular by design.  Xenophobia, homophobia and racism are impediments to economic diversity.  Whenever I drive back to my hometown, I am always struck by the many motels along the way that proudly advertise that they are "American owned," meaning, of course, that they aren't run by an Indian family who is every bit as American as you or I.  Our bi-racial family was an oddity in our town, but we mostly got a "pass" for at least being half Asian and not half black, the biggest tabboo of all.  Well, I say "biggest" only because I was able to hide my homosexuality until I left.

Yes, I still harbor some bitterness. The halcyon Mayberry myth irritates me.

But back to the author's example of the lack of Del Monte green beans.  The grocer makes less of a profit on those than the store brand.  Sure, the customer prefers the Del Monte beans and is entitled to decide what goes in her casserole.  But does she have the awareness and vigilance to reward the grocer for carrying the Del Monte beans by buying something else within his store that she would otherwise buy at Wal-Mart?  I am often tempted when shopping at Sun Harvest, a locally-owned grocery store, to pass on some of the things that I could pick up for less at HEB or another large store.  But I try not to.  I buy the cereal and dairy that cost more so that they can keep providing me with the other items I go there for.

Expanding on this theme...

Buy the overpriced air filters from your town's only HVAC repairman rather than getting them from Wal-Mart.  Wal-Mart isn't going to come fix your furnace when he goes out of business.

Buy the overpriced car from your town's only dealership rather than driving a hundred miles for a better deal.  The distant dealer isn't going to pick you up if your car breaks down or buy uniforms for your son's Little League team.

And so on.

Sure, this is overly simplistic, but the only way to effect the changes you want to see is to follow the money.  See where it goes.  In its current route, it flows from your pocket to the bigger town down the road, then on to Bentonville, and finally to Washington, where it continues to buy politicians whose policies favor globalization, big businesses and the urban areas with more votes in one square mile than your whole county has.

And the cycle not only repeats but intensifies with each repitition.

"For a long time now, the prevailing assumption has been that if the nation is all right, then all the localities within it will be right also.  I see little reason to believe that this is true.  At present, in fact, both the nation and national economy are living at the expense of localities and local communities...In rural America, which is in many ways a colony of what the government and the corporations think of as the nation, most of us have experienced losses that I have been talking about: the departure of young people, of soil and other so-called natural resources, and of local memory."

-Wendell Berry

Thanks, Greg for your thoughts.  I believe this quote from The Work of Local Culture is pretty relevant to the conversation.  Not only does rural America need to be rejuvenated when it comes to local economies, but we also need to restore local memories and stories.  There's many diverse cultures that are disappearing rapidly with the corporate take-over of rural America, and many of those cultures revolve around the locally owned, unique businesses that are going under.  With the homogenization of America, we're losing all the things that make us individuals.  We seem to be missing the idea that the value of goods is not just a matter of price - it's a matter of who made the product, how it was made, where it was made, and who the money will support.  The centralization of our businesses has got to stop, and only we the people can do so (who, by the way, businesses only view as 'consumers', not real individual people).  The beauty of our country is that NOT every place is the same...and each separate community brings something new to the table. 

This posting resonates with me in many ways, not least of which being that I too live in Overton...

My family moved to Overton in 1989, when I was 13 years old. Back then, it looked like a lot of small towns in East Texas. It had a big grocery store (Brookshires), a smaller one (Affiliated), and even a locally-owned one right in the middle of town.

We had two different Dollar Stores, a Perry’s general store, even a couple video stores.

The nearby towns of Kilgore (10 miles) and Henderson (14 miles) had “regular” Wal-Mart stores but the appeal wasn’t near as much as it was then. Both stores closed at 9 p.m. and opened late on Sundays.

In fact, Overton even had a Ford and a Chevy dealership until the oilfield crash in the early 1980s.

Graduating from high school in the late 1990s, my high school sweetheart and I hit the ground running and got the hell outta there by the time the Supercenters started to run all the locally-owned companies into the ground.

Attending school at the University of Oklahoma, living in college-town Norman, my wife and I started opening our eyes to what the corporate world was doing to the “highways and hedges” of small-town America.

Moving out to the urban East Coast for a few years, my wife and I got caught up in the “rat race” and soon decided it was time to come back to Overton and bring back what we had learned/experienced to help revitalize our hometown.

Several of the above commenters have already done an excellent job of interacting with the challenges of turning this sort of “battleship” around in mid-stream, so I’ll not belabor the issue.

I would only add that the primary challenge I have experienced thus far is dealing with the mindset that the creature comforts of accessibility and “always low prices” have afforded to so many are costing all of us in the long run. The old adage about cutting off one's nose "to spite the face" comes to mind.

When I am talking to another area resident, be it in church or just around town, I am finding that it doesn’t matter if the produce is grown in fertile East Texas soil or that of Latin America…  the bottom line is the bottom line.

There’s a certain futility in trying to make the case to local moms about a grocery co-op or a car-pooling group, when most of them are driving Dodge Chargers or massive Dually pickup trucks.

To quote the irrepressible Mark Driscoll, we are spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like.

It’s a zero-sum game with no winner and a bunch of losers.

Nevertheless, I remain hopeful that the ongoing economic downturn can somehow force people to think more locally with their money.

Time will tell.

Anyway...  great article and good points all 'round!

Sincerely,
Matthew Prosser
A Place To Stand