As for my situation I live in a town of 300 people--with a bank branch but no ATMs anywhere.
Far from 'outsized amount of hand-wringing over the fate of rural America' the truth is rural America has been somewhere between ignored to outright attacked for the past 50 years. 99.9% of social justice efforts have been focused on the inner-city, targeting the problems of poverty, crime, drugs, discrimination facing those group while completely ignoring the poverty, discrimination and drug abuse of rural America until we realized the rural opioid epidemic is worse today than the urban crack epidemic of the 80s.
Far from being a result of deregulation, our economy is so over-regulated that only the mega-corps with armies of staff dedicated to compliance can stay in business, pushing all the smaller competition out of the market.
A more accurate summary would be: "After 50 years of regulation consolidating power in a handful of urban areas, while only providing social services and affirmative action for the urban poor, the people who live outside of those areas have suffered on both ends of the spectrum"
Last year a spate of articles appeared about how grocery stores had bailed out of small-town/rural America, leaving maybe a Dollar General or something. For years, we've heard about telecom monopolies providing less than realistic service to small-town/rural America. Remember all the hand-wringing over a "digital divide"?
1. Isn't this just market forces at work? Since we're all free market fundamentalists, why does this bother us? 2. This is the result of deregulation, unchecked consolidation, and the populace migrating to cities. Monopolies, or even firms with a lot of monopoly power in oligopolistic markets don't have to meet every need, they just need to keep turning what they consider as an obscene profit. This strikes me as a 2nd order effect of allowing banks to consolidate. 3. Small and medium towns are losing population as well, and may be on the bubble for this sort of thing as well. 4. There's certainly an outsized amount of hand-wringing over the fate of rural America. I'm going to guess that there are urban areas with vastly greater population, that have much the same problems. Don't we usually agree that 15% of Americans are un-banked? This seems like an "electoral college" for concern about rural Americans.