And they won't make those loans in the absence of a viable business plan. (Plus, this isn't Silicon Valley. The prospective business owner is almost certainly going to need to put some of their own money in.) A lot of dying ex-resource extraction towns just don't present much of a business opportunity for anyone. I also suspect that a lot of readers here don't appreciate that really long drives to get to a "real" store is not that unusual across fairly large swaths of the US.