# What do you consider a small town?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [September 12, 2022, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406 "2022-09-12T00:11:52Z")
**Posts on this page:** 15
**Page:** 4
### Author:  [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)
#### Post date: [September 13, 2022, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406/61 "2022-09-13T21:50:41Z")
How many general stores does that town have?
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### Author:  [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Asking_Questions)
#### Post date: [September 13, 2022, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406/62 "2022-09-13T22:05:13Z")
It used to have a Ben Franklin and a Coast to Coast hardware and some other mom and pop downtown stores. Now it has just the C2C downtown, a bunch of empty spaces and some boutique type stores, and big box stores “outside” of town.
I don’t know if old men sit out front of Shopko and chew tobacky and whittle, though.
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### Author:  [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)
#### Post date: [September 13, 2022, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406/63 "2022-09-13T23:05:58Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#):
>
> I spent four years living in the twin cities of Urbana/Champaign, IL that had a combined population of about 80,000, growing to 120,000 when UI students were added and had no bus system. At least in the 60s.
It definitely had a bus system when I was there in '89-91.
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### Author:  [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)
#### Post date: [September 14, 2022, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406/64 "2022-09-14T05:19:02Z")
Around 10,000.
For whatever reason, I would consider the presence of tertiary education to be one of the cutoffs between a small town vs a larger town. There tend to be tertiary education opportunities above 10k people but not as much when below it.
Also a mall. But thats more of an older thing, but once a city gets to 20k or so people they usually have a mall. Plus more than just a couple of fast food places.
Basically whatever my small town lacked.
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### Author:  [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)
#### Post date: [September 14, 2022, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406/65 "2022-09-14T05:21:43Z")
> [@kenobi\_65](#):
>
> > [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](#):
> >
> > eta: and three bars
>
> Growing up in Wisconsin, I observed that:
>
> - Even the smallest towns had a bar
> - If the town was a little bit bigger, it would also have a church as well as a bar
> - A bit bigger still, and it’d have _two_ bars
This has just been my experience regarding grocery stores but
tiny towns (1000 or less people) they have a family dollar or a dollar general
small towns (5-10k or so people) have a walmart as their only grocery store, maybe a mom and pop store.
larger towns (20k+ people) have a walmart grocery and at least a couple of nationwide chain grocery stores.
But yes, no matter how small a town is it usually has a bar, a library and a liquor store. Around me even the tiny towns have multiple churches.
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### Author:  [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Asking_Questions)
#### Post date: [September 14, 2022, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406/66 "2022-09-14T14:19:41Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#):
>
> tiny towns (1000 or less people) they have a family dollar or a dollar general
That’s what my town (600) has now.
The lager town (5500) 20 miles away has the WalMart. (Its hospital is closed, too)
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### Author:  [@Nars\_Glinley](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nars_Glinley)
#### Post date: [September 14, 2022, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406/67 "2022-09-14T16:15:49Z")
Your town sounds a lot like my former town. 600 people. One Dollar General. The next town over (5,700) got a Super Walmart and drove the local grocery store out of business. One bar. One liquor store. One quick stop. One full-service gas station. One bank. Five churches.
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### Author:  [@ParallelLines](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ParallelLines)
#### Post date: [September 15, 2022, 2:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406/68 "2022-09-15T02:14:27Z")
> [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](#):
>
> The **lager** town (5500) 20 miles away has the WalMart. (Its hospital is closed, too)
-bolding mine-
Really, after all the talk of small towns and bars, no one made the joke? In this pit of pedants? I find myself at a loss.
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### Author:  [@Nars\_Glinley](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nars_Glinley)
#### Post date: [September 15, 2022, 3:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406/69 "2022-09-15T03:53:01Z")
I beerly noticed.
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### Author:  [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)
#### Post date: [September 15, 2022, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406/70 "2022-09-15T03:55:56Z")
To me, 10,000 is too large to be a small town. It’s not a large town, but it’s not a small one, either. So I picked the next option down, which was 1000.
It looks like, however, that some people chose 10,000 to mean the same thing, saying their real number is somewhat lower.
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### Author:  [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)
#### Post date: [September 15, 2022, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406/71 "2022-09-15T07:16:24Z")
After thinking a bit more, my experience comes from growing up in Utah, where we don’t have villages, and only read them in stories about England or such.
Both my parents grew up on farms, with my father living a few miles out of a town with a population of 300 plus where he went to elementary school, then he went to a high school in a city with a population of 3,000ish.
So for him, several hundred was a town and several thousand was a small city, but you know farm kids. He said he and other farm kids would get teased in gym because their legs would be dusty under their trousers from farm chores before school, and the “city kids” never had to work hard.
My mom grew up on a farm in southern Idaho with a population about 650 people at the time, so that was a town for her. They had lived with her grandmother for a while in Logan, Utah with a population then of about 12,000 so clearly a city for her.
I spent 20 plus years in Tokyo, so and I think it’s mostly relative.
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### Author:  [@WildaBeast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WildaBeast)
#### Post date: [September 15, 2022, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406/72 "2022-09-15T16:47:27Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#):
>
> I care more about how the entity relates to the nearby area than the number of residents. Is it a suburb in a swath of suburbia? Then it’s not really a small town, even if it’s legal structure is “town”. I’d it is own thing, with nothing more important within an easy commute? Then it might be a small town. Or a city.
The municipality I live in is officially a “city”, with a population over 80,000 as of the 2020 census. But it’s completely overshadowed by Sacramento, 25 or so miles away. The city used to have its own minimal bus service, but now it’s been taken over by the Sacramento Regional Transit District, and while one could probably use it to get around town if necessary, it’s mainly geared towards taking people to/from the light rail stations, which in turn is primarily geared towards carrying commuters to/from Sacramento. If I want to fly somewhere, I use Sacramento’s airport. The closest thing to a downtown is a couple blocks of historic Gold Rush era buildings; the rest is strip malls and subdivisions and typical suburban sprawl.
Contrast that with where my parents live, La Crosse, Wisconsin. Population 51,000 and change as of the last census. There’s no other place of similar importance within an hour’s drive, and the nearest really big cities (Madison and Minneapolis/Saint Paul) are more like 2.5 hours away. I’m not sure what the public transportation is like, but it has its own airport with commercial flights. It’s tiny and has fairly limited service, but it has one. There’s a real downtown, and a state college. Despite being smaller, La Crosse feels more like a “real” city.
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### Author:  [@N9IWP](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/N9IWP)
#### Post date: [September 15, 2022, 7:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406/73 "2022-09-15T19:12:05Z")
(In La Crosse as I type this). There is the LaCrosse MTU which has quite a few routes within the city and nearby. Note that bordering Onalaska has a population of 18,800 (The metro area is about 139,000)
[https://www.cityoflacrosse.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=834](https://www.cityoflacrosse.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=834)
Brian
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### Author:  [@WildaBeast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WildaBeast)
#### Post date: [September 15, 2022, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406/74 "2022-09-15T19:28:54Z")
> [@N9IWP](#):
>
> The metro area is about 139,000
Which is another thing that makes La Crosse more of a “real” city to me. The city I live in is lumped into the greater Sacramento metro area. La Crosse is the center of its own metro area.
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### Author:  [@pjd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pjd)
#### Post date: [September 15, 2022, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-consider-a-small-town/971406/75 "2022-09-15T20:15:30Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#):
>
> I would say 100,000 is a small city.
> 50,000 a large town.
> 1000 is not even a town but a village or something.
This.
And i’m iin the UK
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