My fellow citizens, I write this article up in arms (and, for good reason) about the recent actions taken by big box grocery and drug stores.
I see many of you vowing to nevermore darken the sliding glass door of your local Walmart, nevermore will the industrial air conditioner blow your hair back after you walk 300 yards in the blistering heat from across the runway sized parking lot. The soulless mumble of “Welcome to Walmart” from some poor corpse, they’ve propped up next to the missing children bulletin board and the Redbox kiosk that’s being sworn at by a large lady in her pajamas at 4 PM, will be but a memory for you from now on. You’re better off for it, and we applaud you, for the most part.
“We’re going to show those libtards!” is what everyone is saying now. You’ve had enough and you aim to show them that your rights aren’t up for debate! You’re going to take your business elsewhere! Because that’s what we do in this country, we vote with our wallets and we will be heard! So, you call your doctor and tell him not to send your prescriptions to these stores. You vow to get your food and sundries at a local shop – just like when you were a kid, right? You hop in your car and you drive down the street to Johnson’s Pharmacy, its been in town for years and they’ve always treated people well.
Alas, when you drive through your half-empty town square and stop your car in front of a vacant building, you are shocked to find a different scene. Johnson’s Pharmacy is closed, boarded up and covered with graffiti. The old, hand-painted wooden sign, actually made by Old Man Johnson, is still hanging under the awning, acting as an epitaph on another tomb of what used to be small town America.
“How can this be? What happened?” you ask as you clutch your prescription for Cialis, insulin, and a cocktail of blood pressure medications. You’re taken aback. This was the pharmacy your mother and father used to take you for a Coke float, it now sits empty, abandoned, and defiled by junkies and degenerates who squat within its bones.
The truth is what Al Gore would call inconvenient. You see, when the big box store moved to town, you stopped going to Johnson’s. “Those prices were outrageous, who needs a soda fountain?” you would ask yourself as you drove pass the place of your youth and walked into the cold, stucco building with the large red letters to get your drugs. You weren’t alone in this either.
As more and more of poor Mr. Johnson’s customers left and went to the big box store, his debts added up. He couldn’t compete with the backroom deals between Big Pharma and their new shiny pill mills. Eventually, like many poor business owners, Mr. Johnson had to close his business.
“Its not my fault, he wasn’t a good business man!” you’re now declaring defensively. “The free market is a dog-eat-dog world, that’s capitalism” you add smugly, as the panic sets in that blood is on your hands for the murder of Main Street. You see, when you took the easy way out and refused to help your neighbors, instead choosing soulless corporations, you started to tighten the noose around small-town America. By trying to save a quick buck, you sacrificed the quality of your goods and services.
When you gave the big stores your business, over people you knew and grew up with, you gave them complete control to trample on your rights. The chickens have come home to roost, the reaping of what was sewn has come. We have no one to blame, but ourselves.
The power held by these big stores was given willingly by us, the consumer. If you can find locally owned businesses around you, I implore you to support them. I only pray we aren’t too late.
-By Dixie Anon
O I’m a good old rebel, now that’s just what I am. For this “fair land of freedom” I do not care at all. I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.
Excellent article, yes, we gave the economic power to the corporations. Now these same corporations are punishing our rights of free thought and unhindered speech.
The corporations, along with cheap Chinese made goods, allowed the consumer to slit his own throat. Now, not only does the free thinker face persecution from government and academia, they face it from commerce as well. This is the perfect trifecta of control.
Resistance for the average Citizen, can be as simple as buy from the traditional small retailer. This idea you have should be implemented as a corner stone equal to Home School and Home Church.
I know that place in the header picture. was a boom town in eastern KY. once the mines closed in that area 20-30 years ago the town died. it was one of those towns that only exist because of one industry and once that’s gone the town goes too.
Ideal place for a colony.
An excellent article that cuts to the very core of what we have allowed Wal-Mart to do to the country. This is Wal-Mart’s fault, rather it is ours. We have sold out our communities, and rights, for cheap Chinese garbage. We did that readily in the name of instant gratification to fill a whole in our lives that cannot be filled with material goods.
Sorry, but that should be – This is not Wal-Mart’s fault, rather it is ours.
Also “..to fill a hole (not a ‘whole’) in our lives”
I can’t stress enough how important it is for people to start businesses. Your local government is not going to “revitalize” these area’s. It is the same people who built them that are going to and that means us. That means taking a risk because that’s what not even just Southerners but American’s period used to do. No one takes risks anymore. They would rather trade vast success with a degree of risk for the comfort and security of easy mode. It’s almost like playing a slot machine, just pull the lever instead of sitting down at the blackjack table because card games require you to actually use your brain.