Back to the OP, I think the idea that small towns are inherently or inescapably doomed without some kind of obvious economic support is… wrong. The only reason it might seem so is that those living in larger cities never hear about small towns except when they’re in dire straits.
I can go fifty miles, inside my own state, and be asked where my town is. We just don’t make the news, good, bad or economic.
Local restaurants running on a shoestring isn’t a sign of decrepitude. All restaurants everywhere run on a shoestring.
How about Foxburg, PA?
It’s a cute little town along the upper Allegheny with a population of 183. Nice restaurants, a winery, and the nine-hole Foxburg Country Club, founded in 1887. It has been recognized as the oldest continuously operated course in the United States.
Nowhere less so than up here, where small businesses maintain that the only thing needed for success is to be [del]damn good at what you do[/del] ETA - work your ass off. Which is a nice mythos that might have worked in the days when a town business got the town’s business, but now it leads to a lot of folks sitting in tattered armchairs, muttering about how hard they worked and it shoulda been good’nuff.
I’ve lived in three town of about 3,000, and never had the feeling that they were economically depressed. None were close enough to a large city to be bedroom towns, and none had any unusual attraction such as tourism, college, or large central industry. Lots of people had new cars, most neighborhoods were relatively tidy, basic needs were available at local retail outlets, there was no significant deficiency in law enforcement or public education or utilities or infrastructure.
The towns in question were Hiawatha KS, Madison FL and Salem MO. In one of them, I was even a member of the City Planning Commission, and everything at the municipal level functioned normally as far as I could see.
Don’t let your untrained eye fool you. As I said above, the visual clues are very different, and that’s what bothers you. You see the lower maintenance level (ratty signs, faded stuff in the windows, etc) and assume it’s caused by poverty. But it may be caused by something else: indifference, combined with plain old common sense of country- folk.
In many small towns, everybody knows every single shop. And often , there is virtually no competition.
So you don’t have to re-paint your sign, or put flashy, attention-getting displays in the window.
Or, even if there are various competitors in the same business, there is still a big difference between small-town marketing and the big city which you are used to. In the big city, apppearance is important to entice customers.
But in a small town, people just don’t care about flashy appearances. They choose where to shop for personal reasons (ie. they know the owner, Or they’ve been shopping there for two generations, and they feel comfortable there. ) A new coat of paint won’t affect their decision to enter the store…And there are very few newcomers to town , so a new coat of paint or a flashy display window also won’t attract any new customers. So the owner doesn’t waste money on irrelevant expenses.
Maybe, just maybe, this is true in the really wide-open spaces where towns are many miles apart. In my experience with two or three small towns that were only a few miles from others, or a dozen miles from a larger town, it’s a recipe for slow disintegration. As I said, maybe it used to be that if you were the hardware store in town, everyone automatically bought their stuff from you. (And there’s no shortage of both fictional and real stories about people who Shopped Elsewhere.)
However, I’ve sat and watched two parallel processes happen with small-town business in the last decade. The first is that old-line, sometimes generational businesses watch their trade dwindle and dwindle, because their clientele ages out and people will drive to the next town (or the city) for things instead of being limited by travel difficultly or local custom. I’ve talked to many, and they will whine and whine and whine about how it’s always been good enough to just “be there.” It’s rude and obnoxious to, say, put up a new sign that actually matches what the business evolved into (say, all-makes auto repair instead of farm and truck repair). Nothing I can say to them will get them out of a mindset that hasn’t really worked - or at least hasn’t really produced success - for decades.
And then there’s the newcomers who do the same thing. Rent a building, hang a tastefully discreet sign, open the door and hang out an OPEN flag each morning… and quietly sit behind their counter, proud of their hard work and dedication and skill and getting nothing but friends, family and a few random passersby as customers.
Yes, marketing etc. is very different in small-town America than it is in any kind of larger town or city or high-density location… but I’ve watched, almost literally in tears a few times, as friends and damned good merchants with every piece for success in their hands sit in quiet, humble silence, believing “that’s all it should take” as the kitty dwindles and they eventually close, now flat broke and back to whatever job they left.
It’s pretty much accepted in the real estate industry that there is too much retail space in the US, and that is no less true in many rural areas than in metropolitan areas or overall. In general, the rule of thumb is that each person can support maybe 15 to 20 square feet of retail space. So, a town of 3,000 people can support 45,000 to 60,000 square feet of retail space. 50 years ago such a small town might have had a 10,000 square foot grocery store, hardware store, general store and small shops that added up to about that amount.
Now, such a small town might have a 30,000 square foot grocery store, 9,000 square foot dollar store and a few shops, with a 100,000 square foot Walmart down the road between towns. A 300,000 square foot mall and other shopping centers might be in a larger town or small city within easy driving distance. Then add in Amazon and all of the online shopping. It’s no wonder that small stores struggle to survive, let alone thrive.
And all the marketing in the world isn’t going to change it much for the storefront trying to eek out a living. I’m not really sure what point you are trying to make in your last couple of posts, Amateur Barbarian, so I would like to ask for clarification and elaboration, if possible. It sounds to me like you are blaming the small business owners for a lack of savvy or marketing prowess, whereas I would suggest that isn’t the problem at all, but rather one of too many shopping options and too much retail space.
As far as small towns being destitute, I agree with the stance that the different look, older buildings and less structured appearances might be partly due to lower incomes, but does not necessarily reflect poverty. The cost of living is a lot less in most rural areas and small towns, so it doesn’t take as much money to live, but there is less left over for property upkeep.
Lots of ski resort towns are necessarily far removed from the big city. Taos, NM immediately comes to mind, but they are all over the place. Although you don’t see them too much in The South, for some reason.
That’s kind of what I was wondering- basically if the signifiers for economic stability and success are the same in small towns as larger cities. It sounds like maybe they’re not- I think Orwell’s final sentence of his last post puts it very succinctly.
Lots of small towns in the suburbs of major metro areas are doing fine because their income isn’t derived locally. I was just down in the suburban Philadelphia area, the towns are thriving. They’re bedroom communities with people who can afford the real estate taxes, roads are being improved, sewers installed, brand new road signs everywhere, parks being built, good schools, and virtually no local industry.
It just so happens that on this, the 3rd of June, the Washington Post decided to try to find out what happened to Bobbie Gentry.
After a fair amount of digging, the reporter believes she now lives just outside of Somerville, TN.
If you poke around Somerville on Google Street View you won’t see much. Some one- and two-story buildings around the courthouse. Not really run-down, but certainly sleepy.
Unelss you knew exactly where to look, you’d never guess that just outside of town there’s a gated road that has some very large homes, including an 8,000 sq. ft. house “with a great pool.”
That’s specifically what I’m saying they do. People start a business and have a terribly outdated expectation that just because they open a door and hang out a sign, business will come to them. There might be some remaining justification for that attitude in suburban malls or busy city streets; maybe just being there with a desired product or service subverts any need for promotion, and the business will grow from organic accumulation of a customer base.
In small towns, once a when, it was the same: if you opened a barber shop, or a hardware store, or a small engine repair service, it was a pretty sure thing that everyone in town knew you were there and would patronize you both for convenience, and not to drive some distance to another town, and because of the sense of community support small towns (mostly used to) have.
But… if you open a business in a small town now, in an obscure location without much drive-by visibility, and a sign that’s a bit of a chore to read even if you’re parked in front of it, and just quietly wait for people to find you and build your client base as in the above two cases… you might as well not even bother.
I’ve watched a dozen businesses come and go in five years here - all good people, with a good “product” of some kind, who worked long hard hours, bent over backward to give great service, were loved by the few customers they had, all of it. Every piece for success except ever getting over the hump of being self-sustaining - being known by enough potential customers to acquire a client base that will generate enough traffic and revenue to succeed, or even keep the doors open without digging further into reserves.
A dozen. Restaurants, caterers, pet food stores, and others that by any right should have been successful with trade from this town and the ones around us. But they all had this peculiar attitude that ANY kind of promotion or marketing was… rude, arrogant, Just Not Done, something. I suppose someone who opened a shop in 1965 and bought every signboard for ten miles around would have been considered pushy, but we’re fifty years on, and people simply don’t have the automatic drive to patronize in-town businesses any more.
And noting the snark up there, I’m not talking about Madison Avenue Marketing!!! here - just taking all the steps necessary to let people know you are there and in business. And they won’t do it. Working (very) hard, treating customers (exceptionally) well, having a good (great-essential-worthwhile) product … that’s all it should take. The “better mousetrap” fallacy.
And one day the Open sign doesn’t turn around and another business fails, so quietly hardly anyone notices it go. Just because they were unable to (Dear God!) speak up a little.
This isn’t vague philosophizing. It’s observation of around two dozen businesses, half of which I knew well. It’s very frustrating to watch.
ETA: And yes, there have been success stories, too - and the difference is the owners knew to do a sufficient amount of “presence” development. Nothing more. Heavy marketing campaigns for anything are pretty rare here, and not needed for any potentially successful business.
What marketing would you recommend for a small town retail business? Hoe do you create the presence you speak of? Advertising is extremely expensive, and much of it goes out to a regional audience that may be relatively far away. As many businesses go broke by spending too much on advertising as not advertising enough, I suspect.
This is a particular sore spot with me.
The negative terminology of balanced, versus, growth.
A large number of small towns that seem to be declining, are only so in respect to, and in competition with, growth due to negative factors, in other towns and cities.
Stagnant is a usual term, used to describe, steady state or balanced.
Most of these steady state towns are in decline, due to existing in a greater growth economy. They are in a real steady state, due to the surrounding economy being in a stable state. Not a lot of influx of new people. No real population growth. But, they are hit with inflation costs that pertain to the distant, growth based economy.
We are now all in this position. Our growth based economy is putting inflation pressures on us, that our stagnant wages cannot balance. We are declining like a lot of those small towns. We are singly and collectively becoming small towns. Fewer individuals are becoming the magnets for all rewards of growth. As larger towns and cities were.
Those small towns, with stable incomes, not eroded by fake growth inflation. Would be very solid communities. None or little debt. Great infrastructure and public services. renewing things as needed. As would reasonably hard working individuals.
We are in a fake economy, that relies on adding consumers, to pay for it’s mistakes and feed the greed heads. Never ending manufacture of more debt carriers and payers. Even if we have to import them and breed them.
Death spiral.
Their are several thriving small towns in South Dakota.
For exampleLemmon (pop 1200) and Mobridge (pop 3600) up north. Spearfish and Deadwood in the black hills and of course Sturgis (pop 6500) where for about 2 weeks a year turns into a big city of 100,000. In the southeast one of my favorite towns isViborg (pop 782).
Their are many others that are doing well with good schools and nearby jobs paying well into the 6 digits. And no, its not all white either.
Thing is in South Dakota their is quite a distance between towns with few trees so the towns feel more isolated and therefore become self sufficient.
I forgot to mention Wall, (pop 786) home to the famous Wall Drug. Their big problem is such low unemployment they cant find enough workers. In fact all over South Dakota lack of workers is a big issue.
Mobridge is my home town. And it is not thriving. It’s a decent and stable but no real growth. It’s had the same population and basically the same business’s for the past 30 years. And every time I go back it seems a little more rundown.
What it does have going for it is that it is the biggest town in a 100 mile radius so as the smaller towns nearby die, Mobridge picks up some of their business. Also some hunting & fishing tourism and government money with two reservations and lots of retirees from the surronding areas.
Thats deceptive. The reason there is low unemployment is that people move the hell out of dodge. Out of my HS class of 70 people, less than 10 have stayed.