Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there

Can confirm, live in a rural farming/ranching area. Drive past farms (vegetable, grass, ornamental, and commodity) every day. Local grocery store trucks produce in from all over the country. The local grocery stores (Wal Mart, HEB) are also higher priced than even their stores in the nearby suburban area. We drive weekly to Aldi for most of our groceries, or to the bigger, nicer HEB with better food. The local farmer's market is overpriced trash / antiques and junk. We do have a local friend that gives/sells/trades eggs with us though.

To be honest, 3 years later and you still can’t figure out why Trump won.

And no, I am not a Trump supporter. I didn’t vote for him. I won’t vote for him. But it’s really easy to see how he won.

Sure, and yet somehow they are consistently voting in people who want to dismantle both.

The town in which I grew up was 30 minutes from the nearest Wal-Mart by car, and 15 minutes from the nearest real grocery store by car. Hell, "town" was three minutes by car from my house and we lived "close" compared to several of my friends. We had no police department. We had a volunteer only fire department and first responder unit. We partnered with a town 5 miles away for our school district. We were 13 miles from the nearest 4 lane highway. Most of our county roads were gravel. We had few problems with safety, food access, or economic access to plentiful jobs.

Living in a tiny, remote, rural town presents one with a ton of low level, low overhead, low skill, and valuable entrepreneurial opportunities. Property and office space are cheap. Housing, which would go for well into the $300k range in cities within commuting distance of an hour or less, costs between $50,000 and $200,000 (for a pretty luxurious place). Agriculture, inevitably the bedrock of most rural communities, provides needs for mechanics, scrap management, custom application, fuel, carpentry, veterinary medicine, real estate, law, education, commodities trading, banking, environmental protection, equipment dealerships, various parts suppliers, hairdressers, food and entertainment, communications, rental property management, accounting, coaching, and pretty much every other economical human endeavor. The opportunity is that most of these needs are met by people in the community - people who you know well and trust - and are insulated from competition by distance and the small market size. Many people were self-employed; as doctors, vets, concrete masons, farmers, restaurateurs, gas station franchise owners, specialty parts wholesalers, junkyard operators, etc. Sure, there was only one store where you could get plumbing supplies, but that family lived very comfortably in that niche, and had for two generations. You either chose to stay and start your own business that could meet a need in the local community, usually some specialized unskilled construction or mechanical labor, or got a degree and commuted to the nearby cities. Food was procured once a week from the far away grocery stores; but other than commuters and the weekly grocery errand, you often didn't need to leave the vicinity of the town for weeks or even months at a time. In cities, even with suburban life, not needing to leave your community for extended days at a time is exceedingly rare, even for suburbs with approximately the same population as my old small town. I drive thirty minutes across town to my clients' offices, for example. New Yorkers take the subway across burroughs to get to their jobs. The authors overstate the problems people in small towns face.

We're just a blink away from a new era of autonomous vehicles, which should make most of this a moot point.

For all of these small rural communities, it makes sense for each of the local governments to purchase a fleet of vehicles that offer free shipping to its community from distant urban areas and subsidize on a local level.

The future of bricks-and-mortar (or cinder blocks and cement) is anyones guess, but frictionless delivery strategies could surprise us all with the remedies and solutions to the old-world logistics problems.