[gaoshan]

The aspect of small local stores functioning as a social hub really hits hard. The social hub, such as it is now, can be so much larger and less personal that it really does feel like a loss (a negative even).

Is the social hub now something like Instagram or a specific forum/subreddit/space for a school or neighborhood? These are really insufficient replacements and people that grew up knowing nothing else likely do not realize just how insufficient they are.

[localhost]

But why do social hubs need to be places of financial transactions?

I was in Delft recently and I really loved their library/community center. Full of music practice rooms, people playing board games on the ground floor, a coffee bar and it was full of people at 8pm. It is open from 9am - 11pm M-F.

You walk or cycle there (free indoor bicycle parking). There is a movie theater across the "street" (no cars).

[breakpointalpha]

They didn't need to be transactional spaces, they need to be spaces that attract people regularly.

The local chicken farmer who works 16 hours a day to keep his farm running isn't going out of his way three times a week to visit the community center for board game night.

He's definitely in the local Tractor Supply store three times a week though...

It's about creating community where people naturally gather, not creating a gathering space then hoping people show up.

[spijdar]

I don’t think it’s about being “places of financial transactions” so much as it’s about places of shared necessity. Everyone has to eat, so everyone goes to the grocery store.

Community centers are great and I’m not going to argue against having “non-commercial recreation”, but the thing about having local stores as social hubs is they might be the only universally shared place of a community. Not everyone is going to want (or be able!) to visit a library, but everyone does need food and other consumables/goods.

[ghc]

We decentralized information, and in doing so we centralized culture. I fear that we are only now coming to understand what we have wrought. I am sure that new social structures will arise to replace the old, but who is to say what lies between? It is not out of the question that even a project with noble intentions such as the web may precipitate a dark age for humanity. I don't say this as a pessimist, but as a wide-eyed realist wondering what happens when human civilization no longer requires humanity.

[unnamed76ri]

I attend a church where most of the folks are older and they don’t seem to get it that younger people won’t just find our church like in the old days because people aren’t connected by local businesses like they used to be. I don’t mind saying on here that I attend St John’s. It doesn’t matter because there’s over 1000 other St John’s in the country. No one can find us using modern means.

[MichaelZuo]

But if it’s so valuable… why aren’t people willing to pay for it?

Forgoing luxuries like a vacation to support local stores full of people you know and trust, that might charge 20% more for the same product, seems like an obvious thing…

That almost no Americans do in reality.

[_DeadFred_]

Huge sections of America/American's are incredibly poor.

Add that the highest income people were the first to switch to Amazon, and are more online first than community first. It didn't take losing too many of those customers for the economics to fall apart.

I live in a tourist town that has had a huge influx of new, higher wealth people post COVID. Surprising to me our businesses/restaurants are doing worse with this new population with more money, not better. They live here for the amenities, but other than on the mountain biking trails/ski mountain/lake (on their boats or remote beaches, detached from most people) you never see them. They work from home, but our walking trails are the sparsest I've ever seen them. None of them seem to go out to eat, especially not lunch. It's awful. And now that they are here, property prices have gone up, so more locals (and the children of locals definitely) will be priced out and replaced by work from home types who... just disappear into their houses. They buy all their gear online instead of supporting the local shops, the local knowledge, the places help organize/arrange for trail maintenance, more land into conservancy. From my one town observation modern upper middle class American's appear to be a net-loss for the local community. They are the types so into their sport they do all the own maintenance, then expect the local shop to do the 1 or 2 things they can't/don't want to do. The local shop can't survive on that little bit of work on your 'all internet bought, self maintained' stuff. They just don't get it.

[cogman10]

Lots of things have happened that have ultimately harmed these small communities.

A major problem is consolidation. A small town hardware store may have had access to multiple suppliers at one point. Those all merged together and ultimately started raising their prices in a "go away" sense to small time purchasers. That's made it incredibly hard to be a store. A big box store gets a lot more foot traffic and has more leverage against distributers which allows them to ultimately outprice a small time store.

My hometown went through this. As a kid, it had a restaurant, a grocery store, a hardware store, and an automobile repair shop. 1 by 1 those all died. The restaurant died because the community never ate there. It became a thing where you'd literally call the owner the night before so they could prepare you a meal the next day. Otherwise they had no traffic. They were too expensive for my small town so nobody would buy a lunch there. The grocery store and hardware store died from being priced out. At one point, just to keep the shelves stocked the owner literally had to buy products from Walmart to sell at the store. No distributor would sell to them.

[Spooky23]

They dont get a choice. You really can’t operate a small store anymore. The distribution networks were all destroyed by the top-5 retailers.

Regional supermarkets are capped by this. The lack of third party distribution means they have to have their own sourcing and distribution. They can’t grow and are slowly being picked off of PE and bigger chains.

It’s even hard for restaurants. When I worked in restaurants in college in my region, we had 6 local produce distributors. Now you have Sysco, US Foods, two regionals, one of which just went PE, and the vertically integrated Chinese markets that prefer to do business within their circle.

I think we are going to have significant political unrest, and the rollup of everything will continue until that federal power is exerted against it. Otherwise, welcome to WalmartKrogerHomeDepot.

[wat10000]

Because if I do that, I lose my vacation and I don’t gain a local store full of people I know and trust.

Collective action problems aren’t solved by individually performing the action, and therefore the fact that people aren’t doing it doesn’t show they don’t want it.

[sowbug]

You think you have a choice to buy local. It's more complicated than that.

"Local stores full of people you know and trust" is what advertising tries to approximate. Instead of forming lasting human bonds with shopkeepers and employees, we are informed by ads who we should patronize. And we pay, indirectly, for that service.

Private equity also takes its pound of flesh. Try hiring a local plumber. They'll always say they're locally owned and operated, which is a partial truth. But when you're charged $400 for 15 minutes of labor, remember that a lot of that revenue goes to private equity, far far away from your hamlet, whether you like it or not.

[etchalon]

Most people struggle to just to stay in front of their bills. It has nothing to do with "willing" and has everything to do with "able".

[petsfed]

A lot of reasons, but the two big ones are:

1) the American cult of self-reliance. The idea that people will not value something they did not themselves work for, even if its given to them by a close friend or family member, is basically synonymous with "the American dream". "Socialism" is so bad to Americans that they would rather have diabetics die because they can't afford the lifesaving medicine they need, than to give handouts to such people, just for them to develop a "dependency". There's even an entire health-influencer industry built around the idea that all health problems not directly caused by trauma are because the person suffering just isn't trying hard enough to be healthy, and not, you know, because of a social and economic system that's actively corrosive to human health. "You're sick because you're too lazy to avoid trans-fats" basically the gist of RFK Jr's ideology.

2) Americans are so opposed to thinking more than 3 months ahead that all they see with that 20% price increase is the impact it has on them right now. The easy access to instant gratification is steadily eroding our ability to be patient or suffer any hardship. This has been growing for a long time (c.f. fresh fruits and vegetables of all stripes, year round) but has reached a sort of fever pitch with the advent of same-day delivery for a vast array of bits and baubles.

[SoftTalker]

Those hubs still exist for things that the internet cannot replace. Barber shops, coffee shops, cafes, and other local dining, pubs and bars. Local parks, especially if you have kids, and other kid-centric events such as sports, scouts, and other activities. Adult rec leagues, gyms, volunteer orgs, etc. But certainly many have gone. There are still bookstores and specialty retailers here and there but not like we used to have.