How many general stores does that town have?
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.
It definitely had a bus system when I was there in '89-91.
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.
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.
That’s what my town (600) has now.
The lager town (5500) 20 miles away has the WalMart. (Its hospital is closed, too)
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.
-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.
I beerly noticed.
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.
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.
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.
(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
Brian
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.
This.
And i’m iin the UK