$4 gas helping revitalize small towns

[Javaman]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25606812/

THOMASVILLE, Ala. - Residents in once-sleepy Thomasville have started complaining about traffic jams on Route 43, which runs right through the town.

Much of the new traffic is coming from shoppers, squeezed by $4-per-gallon gas, who are staying closer to home instead of driving 100 miles each way to the nearest malls in Mobile or Montgomery.

"I just don't drive as much," said Herman Heaton, a 72-year-old retired lumber mill worker, leaning against a Chevy Silverado pickup that now costs him $80 to fill up. "We don't go to Mobile as much as we used to for shopping." Heaton said he now spends about $600 a month on gas, about 10 percent of his income and about double what he spent last year.

<snip>

Many stores in rural towns — from small independent shops to local chains — are starting to enjoy a little life after years of seeing customers bypass them for distant malls. While it may not reverse the decades-long decline of small-town shopping, it could lead national mall developers and merchants to rethink where to build and challenge a basic tenet of retailing: Build, and shoppers will come from miles away.


**I knew this was going to happen. perhaps this will be the death of chinamart and the rebirth of a railroad system that links America again.**

[Lars39]

1. I'm seeing it happen where I live.

I used to never see the local stores' parking lots filled on a Saturday or Sunday here. Now you can't even find a space to park. :)

[Subdivisions]

2. I hope you're right, Javaman. It's high time

everybody slowed down and get back to a more localized way of life. This is great news and thank you for posting it.

[Captain Angry]

3. Big box retailers are only cheaper for two reasons.

1: Buy in mass quantities to reduce costs.

2: Supply chain management based on inexpensive transport to move those less expensive goods to all sites.

[Indenturedebtor]

7. WRONG! 6 Reasons

1 and 2 are correct. You forgot

3: Do everything possible to provide no benefits, and pay your workers as little as possible.
4: Use your leverage to corrupt local and national governments, so as to acquire handouts and regulation exceptions and reductions
5: Acquire your goods from overseas companies to maximize 3+4
6: Destroy your competition by flooding their markets with impossibly priced goods. When local businesses fold you can raise prices again

[NJCher]

4. gasp

$600 a month on gas?

Heaton said he now spends about $600 a month on gas, about 10 percent of his income and about double what he spent last year.


I had read these stories about rural areas getting hit very hard by this crisis but this really puts it into context.

$600 a month is a lot of money, especially when jobs out there don't pay as much as in the urban areas.

I averaged what I spend and it's $92 a month on gas. That was averaged on Feb.-June. I live in a metropolitan area, however.



Cher

[OffWithTheirHeads]

5. Man, he must have one hell of a pension!

If $600.00 per month is 10% of his income, his income is $6,000.00 per month or $72,000.00 per year. This guy is a retired lumber mill worker? Man, I picked the wrong job.

[Kokonoe]

10. Do not worry, Those pension jobs once assumed are gone. nt

[Overseas]

6. Glad to hear it ! I'm a pedestrian ! //nt

[Skink]

8. People are stayng home and shopping.

Rural Walmarts must be taking a beating.

[Frances]

11. There is a huge Walmart in Thomasville, AL

I know because Thomasville is only 15 miles from my hometown.

$600/month is one tenth of a retired mill worker's income?!!! I am sure that no mill in the Thomasville area gives a pension of $72,000 a year.

[redqueen]

9. Another bright side to higher fuel costs.

Thanks...

[RB TexLa]

12. More like rewarding the scamers who have been ripping off the people who don't have cars for years

[Javaman]

15. Please explain? nt

[taterguy]

18. Probably a reference to higher mark-ups at smaller stores

IE, the six pack the giant grocery store sells for five bucks will cost you nine bucks at the corner "convenience" store.

[RB TexLa]

19. The small town grocer who tells her customers "Yes, the milk is $2 cheaper at the Kroger in town,

but you can't afford a car to go there, can you? So shut up and hand the money over."

[Elwood P Dowd]

25. It's obvious you know nothing about small mom & pop businesses.

The big chains buying in massive volumes often sell products for less than small business people like me pay for them. Once they force us all out of business, the big box stores then slowly start raising prices again. I finally closed my retail business a few years ago after losing money for three straight years. My sister is still hanging on with her business, but she makes less than $20,000 a year working 7 days a week. She is one of those small businesses you hate and like to call a "scammer" for trying to survive the onslaught of giants like Wal Mart. She makes peanuts, and the Walton Family is worth 100 billion.

Why is it you constantly support the corporate agenda on DU? You continue to praise predatory capitalism and fake free trade deals that are literally destroying middle America.

[RB TexLa]

27. I grew up in a town where the local grocer did exactly what I described

they made their money by charging about a 30 to 40% premium over the stores in the towns about 30 miles either direction. The people who bought all their groceries there were people who didn't have cars and couldn't get to the other stores. We would go in if we had to have a single item. There'd be no cars in the parking lot and twenty people in the store paying the price for not having enough money to buy and own a car.

I know not all store owners in small towns are like that but many are.

The worst thing they did was the "cold beer tax," a self collected "tax" on cold beer. Of course cold beer was sold by the can only, another added mark up along with the 25 cent a can "tax."

[LiberalPersona]

13. That's logical

Cheap fuel is what allows a national economy to exist, without it people have to go back to the old ways of local business before vehicles were invented.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

14. holy SHITE...my hometown...

now i have to read...

sP

[SoCalDem]

16. The only problem with this, is that most of the Mom&Pop stores have already closed

It's now too expensive for many "small-timers" to open new businesses or to try and revive long ago sold businesses. Not many people have "extra" money laying around, waiting to be poured into a family business. The townspeople who bailed on those "small" enterprises, in favor of Starbucks/ BestBuy/ Target/ Walmart/ BigBoxMalls,Inc only have to look in the mirror when they wonder what ever happened to the local diners, camera shops, shoe stores, dress shops, independent department stores, etc.

There are towns all over the US, with boarded up downtown buildings, empty lots, where thriving family businesses used to be. Fickle, cheapskate townspeople waved bye-bye to them as they barreled down the highway to shop at the "new mall", and the businesses died....no surprise there...

Once it's gone, you can't get it back..

[Deja Q]

21. Why can't they come back?

[SoCalDem]

22. a family business that folded 5-10 years ago

also sold the fixtures, the machinery, the equipment..let the lease go or sold the actual building (if they owned it)..

It would be very costly to start over and have to re-buy all that stuff, and start from scratch.

[applegrove]

17. We can only hope that local businesses rejuvenate-Keeping the money

at home as opposed to in the hands of the Walton Family of Walmart.

[MetaTrope]

20. Bush's plan: Back to the Middle Ages. Right on schedule.

"When I was in Muckley the other day--"

"Muckley? That's a ways."

"Two miles or more, easy."

"Gosh, I'd like to travel someday."

[insleeforprez]

23. Of course, this is a very short term result.

In rural towns, you have to drive longer distances in daily life. Therefore, higher gas prices should drive people away from low density areas and towards high density areas, but it will take a long time; the cost of moving is astronomically higher than the savings from driving less in a city.

[Liberal_in_LA]

24. why is a retiree spending $600 a month on gas?

[slampoet]

26. That's 150 gallons a month!!!

At 20 miles per gallon that means he drives 36,000 miles per year!!!


I know territory salesmen who don't put that kind of miles on their car.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

28. I know a woman who sold her grocery store.

Her ancestors had run it for five generations. It even had a tin ceiling and ripply old hardwood floors.

The only people who shopped there were old people who couldn't drive. She delivered and put up the groceries.

The town has 1200 people and there used to be 2 grocery stores there. Now you have to drive 12 miles to the county seat to get to Mall Wart and H.E.B.

Or you have to drive 20 miles in the other direction to the next county over to the MallWart.


The downtown has been dead for years. You can buy a gun at the hardware store, and there is a Laundromat From Hell (if it looked like shit, that would be an improvement). There are two banks and a dollar store and a new Subway out on the highway bypass.