The Sad Death of American Towns through Globalisation – Or – Never Trust Walmart

IWB ^ | Mark Angelides

[davikkm]

When major employers come to a town, replace the local businesses, suck up the people they have made unemployed and then leave a few years later, there is very little hope of recovery. It is destroying towns and families. And what’s worse, it makes the victims complicit in their own demise.

Ten years ago in McDowell County, West Virginia, a new Walmart came to town. It was warmly embraced as an employer because the coal industry was in decline; but an unexpected side effect (to the local population, not Walmart) was to shut down many of the smaller businesses that employed many of the other townsfolk. And now Walmart have closed down and moved on, leaving the people without work, without the local business infrastructure that existed before, and sadly, without hope of rebuilding.

On 15 January 2016, Walmart announced that it was closing down 154 superstores in the US alone. Many of these are in town like McDowell, that have become reliant on the stores for employment and goods. It is easy to sneer and say that they should have thought about supporting local businesses while they had the chance, but the real villain in the whole episode is the Corporate/Globalist outlook that does not regard people as people, but as a block consumer base to which they have no responsibility.

[Nifster]

And some make obviously sarcastic remarks to a previous post

[TalonDJ]

Tell me something I don’t know. I live rurally and commute almost 40 miles each way. Yeah you can go a long way. But as someone who lives this I know going shopping 60 miles away would take close to an hour each way (counting the slower traffic areas in town and walking into the store, etc). So you sure ain’t doing it every evening. It is a commitment to show somewhere that far a way. You go for a specific reason and plan a big chunk of your day around it. At a minimum you are going to blow 2 and a half hours. So you tend to plan to hit more than one place while you are ‘in town’. Your also going to burn a quarter to a third of a tank of gas. Hence what I said. You don’t do that drive unless you have something you need that you can’t get even close to as cheap ‘at home’. Or that you can’t get at all. Hence if a store that far away put home town store out of business then the hometown store was seriously deficient in selection and/or price.

[impimp]

Your language....who are these peasants and serfs making our products? Why don’t you like cheaper products?

How does importing items from other countries hurt the USA?

[Edward.Fish]

> Ah regulation, the fig leaf of the naked globalist Free Traitor.

I’m no globalist — in fact if I said what I really thought about globalists w/o filter I’d probably be banned due to “foul and vile language” — but regulation *is* a big cost, I’ve seen where compliance generated tons of needless work for needless regulations... it’s all the more aggravating when you realize that huge swaths of regulation are not authorized under the Constitution.