Small Business Decline Over Generations

Drive across America, through small towns. Some are ghost towns, others barely hanging by a thread. You will drive past factories, mills, silos, trains, rails rusting and homes abandoned, vandalized, collapsing. They make for great photos as I like to do. Haunted, melancholy images of times gone by, simpler lives of communities and families once closely bonded and privacy we no longer dream of.

Lots of Americans are proud that they “come from” small towns. “Came from” is the operative here. There’s a reason that so many people come from small towns.

We have watched the decline of small towns not over the past few years but over generations. It may not be you that came from a small town but your parents or grandparents.

Most of that decline can be directly attributed to two things. The rise of corporations and NAFTA.

In the 60’s, your grandparents may have lived in a small town. Your grandfather may have frequented a local diner where he could walk in and the waitress knew him by name, along with what he always ordered. He could sit by himself at the table by the kitchen door where the owner would wander out and talk to the customers, catch up on how their lives were going. Your grandfather may have met his neighbors like the farmer down the road as they read the paper and talked about the news and the community.

The diner was your first job, busing tables. Your friends from school would come by and order a soda or milkshake. The owner turned…