I agree whole-heartedly with Stilly River Sage.

When the mom and pop stores get forced to close, ther goes any choice you may have had of where to shop in yoru community. The small shops close, the downtown dies, because then everyone has to drive to the damn mall or, increasingly, the stretch of highway that is nothing but one long strip mall. They didn't have these everywhere twenty years ago; now they are inevitable even in small communities.

I remember in my neighborhood, a couple miles from the business district "downtown", there were corner stores. General stuff, butcher shops, a fish store, a liquor store. Close by there'd be small "shopping plazas" with 3 or 4 shops: hardware, a restaurant, pharmacy, shoes or clothing.

Most of these   places are sloed. A shopping mall opened in the 1970s and   kept   getting bigger. Peopel only gradually began going there instead of downtown to shop. Then, the strip malls near the mall started going up. Walmart opened. The downtown clothing, sewing, pharmacy, garden and electronics shops closed. Sam's Club opened. The   little groceries   started struggling a nd   several closed. Home Depot opened. The local lumber yards and hardware   stores closed up shop. The mall then got a multiplex. The downtown cinemas closed.

This insidious equation has repeated itself in millions of towns and cities across America, mainly because people are too lazy to shop around and compare prices, and too short-sighted to realize what   such practices are doing to their communities. Oh, and too   self-centered to understand that the choices they make in life affect other people, and that this in turn just might affect everyone's quality of life just about equally, in the end. They lend a hand in destroying a way of life and little by little that way of life is disappearing.

People now habitually buy much more crap than they need just because it's all under one roof and oh, the prices are so low!

Now, even if these same people who helped destroy their towns thought better of shopping at Walmart (or Home Depot) it wouldn't matter, because they no longer have a choice.

America is done for. Walmart has its sights set on England next.