Woe and alack a day! A sign of the times in a hyper-turbo-techno-industrial economy rocking in the throes of meltdown, a.k.a. compressive deflationary contraction. Lo, what was once a dollar is now seventy-five cents. In another month, it’ll be fifty cents and perhaps they can sign up the celebrity “Fitty Cent” to shill for them. I went into this establishment once out of morbid curiosity about a year ago. The shelves were sparsely stocked with merchandise that looked like it fell off a truck in Guangzhao. Box wrenches made out of metallic margarine. Suspicious-looking snack foods in supernatural colors. Toxic this’n’that. This was, of course, marginal retail and we are seeing the commercial rot proceed from the margins to the center. Pretty soon you’ll see the Target stores closing and maybe, here and there, a WalMart. Don’t wring your hands. This sets America on the pathway to rebuilding Main Street economies, along with the multi-layered, fine-grained local and regional networks required to support them — which will eventually translate into local business opportunities for those who can understand the trend. The dollar store pictured above is in my little town of Greenwich, New York, population around 2,500, a former factory village now with no factories — but plenty of water power!
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