301–310 of 337 posts
" About 5 million people in rural areas have to travel 10 miles or more to buy groceries, according to the Department of Agriculture" is that supposed to sound like a lot? It's probably a 12 minute drive. I know people who drive 60 miles to and from work every day in Texas without batting an eye.
It's a lot for people who can't drive, like children or the elderly.
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> Sorry, by locally produced, I'm referring to (mostly) foodstuffs, additionally, local small retailers that were resellers. A town in the Great Plains doesn't have a climate fit to make most foods locally, unless you call taking shipped-in ingredients and cooking them "making" food.
It certainly can (and did) make most food locally, it's just that it has to be different food - you eat what you can make from locally produced ingredient and don't eat what you can't. The type of food we eat has changed a lot, and the expectation to have "ethnic" food with products grown on another continent, or to have the same vegetables available year-round instead of them being seasonal - that's a relatively rec…
No. Not in eastern Montana. There are regions where you can't live off the land year-round like you think.
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> communities that formerly bought locally produced goods The communities I'm thinking of here never bought locally produced goods for most things. The communities set up along the railroads in the late 1800s never had enough of their own industry to make most things, and a lot of them in the Great Plains never had a climate fit to grow much beyond wheat and cattle. They owed their entire existence to the railroad, a…
Revitalization of a rail network, especially commuter, could work for some of these. If you add a stop that's a 30 minute high speed (150 mile) rail away from 2 major cities, that town, and towns around it would boon.
And the majority of towns that aren't near that one stop would falter even faster.
And if you added one stop per town, your rail isn't high-speed anymore.
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> Not having to commute hours for groceries is a big deal, as is being able to get vegetables of season - and in the rural west these things not a given. What you are describing is a de facto food desert: https://www.cdc.gov/features/FoodDeserts/index.html There might be an easy (albeit costly) way to fix this. Just today I learned about a govt agency called the Essential Air Service: > The United States Department o…
You could use the exact same service and just mule fresh food about on these flights
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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…
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…
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The mom-and-pop stores cannot reasonably compete with Walmart or any other chain store. Their suppliers charge more because they lack the volume for the discounts the big stores charge, they lack the skills/manpower/IT to purchase, stock and maintain the thousands of products in a big store, and last but not least mom-and-pop stores don't get the massive tax breaks and other incentives/bribes that the state provides…
Your description makes it sound like Walmart is better in every way.
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It's a lot for people who can't drive, like children or the elderly.
I don't see how it would help, then, if it were closer, like 2 miles? What would they do, instead not be able to walk there?
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Is Walmart really the kind of one-size-fits-all solution you want, though? Can't you see the value in having specialized, higher quality stores compared to a giant store that may sell you anything, but only garbage? I find that to be a sad perspective. You're literally placing the fate of entire towns in the hands of a single company with a de-facto monopoly. Free markets right, but how is that good? How much does th…
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…
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How many of these same small towns that will gladly take government subsidies scream “socialism” anytime someone mentions government provided health care, increasing the earned income tax credit, education subsidies etc?
All of the states that resisted medicare expansion are seeing their rural hospitals dwindle; so you're not far off.
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> Not having to commute hours for groceries is a big deal, as is being able to get vegetables of season - and in the rural west these things not a given. What you are describing is a de facto food desert: https://www.cdc.gov/features/FoodDeserts/index.html There might be an easy (albeit costly) way to fix this. Just today I learned about a govt agency called the Essential Air Service: > The United States Department o…
I don’t know if nexuist found out about the Essential Air Service the same way that I did, but I learned about it today from the latest Wendover Productions video [0]. A fantastic and informative channel with high production values, if you’re not familiar. [0] https://youtu.be/U1a73gdNs0M