161–170 of 337 posts
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There are such co-ops, in fact -- actually most of them operate on a franchise model. In our area, IGA was one. Our local grocery store was not a member.
For what it's worth, the IGA near me seems pretty nice. I think it's the best grocery store in town.
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There is a lot of blame for Walmart, but let's not forget the car culture that has everyone leaving their town every day and commuting instead of living and working in a community.
Yeah, this isn't really a relevant critique in farm country. You can live in a town and walk to the grocery store, but then you need to drive to work. Or else you can live on a farm and drive to a town to buy groceries. But in no scenario does farming and density work together. Industrial-scale farming doesn't happen without car travel. Subsistence farming does, but if all the farmers are subsistence farmers then the…
Roads should be designed to travel between communities, not bypass communities.
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Stores like Walmart and Dollar stores opened up, and consumer made the choice to shop there rather than at local grocery stores . Sounds like they are getting exactly what they wanted? Reminds me of folks in SF who bemoan the loss of a local butcher store. Sure, they may like buying organic cuts of meat at $15/lb, but it's obviously most people don't, that's why those stores we…
What real choice did consumers have? Walmart came in and drastically slashed prices on groceries because they had the size, money and infrastructure to cheaply move goods around. This was intentional behavior to kill local grocery stores and it worked, because consumers in these areas tend to be poorer and will shop at places that save them the most money. This is intentional behavior abused by Walmart to intentional…
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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 o…
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.
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.
Grocery Stores closing really is happening, and really is a problem. And it's part of what's killing towns - if only because attracting new folk without one is hard. We live in John Day, Or (pop 1700)(County pop 7200, area: about 2x Delaware), which we chose partially because of it's supermarket. The next closest supermarket is 90min away. (Walmart: 2h). Not having to commute hours for groceries is a big deal, as is…
Walmart and the like killed local competition. There’s a gas station I stop at from time to time in the country with a Walmart next door. It’s insanely busy. I have family in the country and they accept having to drive to get decent groceries. There are seasonal vegetable and fruit stands but you couldn’t get everything you need. A local ranch sells beef but it would be quite expensive to buy year around unless you w…
The political flamebait in your last paragraph breaks the site guidelines. That's not ok because it leads to flamewars, as it did—wretchedly—in this case. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit that out of your posts in the future, we'd be grateful. Your comment was great otherwise.
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Choice is an interesting word. Our purchasing decisions are constrained by income, which is limited by education and experience. If someone grows up with poor education in an economically stagnant area, their likely minimum-wage severely limits the freedom to choose. Surplus unskilled labor translates to downward pressure on wages which implies the same for goods on the market - it's a nasty feedback loop that underc…
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.
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.
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Out of curiosity: why did you choose to live in such a remote/rural place?
It seems a lot of people “suffer” from the problem of wanting to live in a nice rural area without a lot of people or hassles but then want most of the same amenities of large cities. And by working remotely and exploiting the situation it never occurs to them to open up their own business/ grocery store. I’m sure other people that live in those areas would love to have a well stocked grocery store as well.
Walmart and the like killed local competition. There’s a gas station I stop at from time to time in the country with a Walmart next door. It’s insanely busy. I have family in the country and they accept having to drive to get decent groceries. There are seasonal vegetable and fruit stands but you couldn’t get everything you need. A local ranch sells beef but it would be quite expensive to buy year around unless you w…
The political flamebait in your last paragraph breaks the site guidelines. That's not ok because it leads to flamewars, as it did—wretchedly—in this case. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit that out of your posts in the future, we'd be grateful. Your comment was great otherwise.
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How many engineers in Europe live on small farms 20+ miles from their employer? Look, engineers can get jobs in the United States without owning a car, too -- but they'd better live in an urban area with public transit, or work remotely (and live in an area where they can still get where they need by transit, bike, or walking). I suppose it's possible that engineers in the French or German equivalents of rural farm c…
>How many engineers in Europe live on small farms 20+ miles from their employer? Not many, because their urban planning is better. Bottom line, car culture is not some fundamental invariant of reality for getting a job, as the original comment was suggesting.
I don't disagree, but I think it's easy to overstate how "planned" the differences between the population distribution in Europe and the United States are -- and I honestly think it can be easy for Europeans to underestimate how dramatic the population density difference is. The EU has over 50% more people in under half the square kilometers, giving Europe a density of ~118 people/km^2 and the US a density of 33.6/km^2 -- and there's almost certainly a wider variance in density over here.
Doing the numbers just now, over three-quarters of the US population lives in states that are less dense than Europe, and over a third lives in states half as dense or less. Car culture is not a "fundamental invariant of reality for getting a job," but for a lot of America, not having a car is simply not a realistic option.