Pener Kropoopkin posted:

I used to live one county over from Nowata, Oklahoma, which became infamous for being one of the first towns that was destroyed by Wal-Mart. They moved a shopping center into the area, which wiped out all of the mainstreet businesses - but after a decade they decided that there wasn't enough of a consumer market to support the store - so they closed up and left the economy in complete ruins. It took another decade before businesses came back to mainstreet, but by then the town was already half depopulated.

When the malls start shutting down the same thing is going to happen to rural towns all across the country.