All politics is local

[jhetley]

The Sears/KMart bankruptcy won't affect us much personally, as both stores here closed a while back. But KMart is the only major store in one northern Maine city, and that location will be closing. Just part of why rural areas feel abandoned by the modern economy.

Comments

[malkingrey]

Nobody wants to buy into running a store in a small rural town who doesn't already like living there, and most of the folks who live there couldn't afford to buy into a lemonade stand. Around here, you get a lot of small non-chain pharmacies and jewelery stores and the like that did okay back when the Sears catalogue was cutting-edge retail tech and driving to the nearest big city was a nontrivial excursion, but now they're being run by the second or even the third generation at just barely enough profit to keep going, and the generation coming up doesn't want anything to do with it. So they close, and nobody comes along to take their place.

(We used to have three auto dealerships here in town, for example, and now we only have one. Lewis Ford closed down over a decade ago when Ford shut down a bunch of low-profit dealerships, and Nugent Dodge shut down when it ran out of Nugents, leaving Brooks Chevrolet the only one still standing.)

[jhetley]

What I find surprising is that Walmart (hiss, boo) puts stores into rural areas in Maine. There's one in Lincoln, for example, and another in Newport. Just for entertainment, you can look up the population figures for them. A few thousand, each.

Costco, which everyone touts as Moral and Upright, doesn't have a single location in Maine. Closest to us is actually in Canada.

[malkingrey]

Doesn't surprise me. Back in the days when Wal-Mart was getting started and was actually run by Sam Walton himself, part of his goal was getting stores into underserved rural areas.

[dewline]

People like Lampert and Mnuchin have so much to answer for, don't they?

[jhetley]

They will have to take a number and wait their turns.