This is the Walmart problem made worse and I'd recommend you read this article [1]. The problem is multi-faceted: When a discount chain comes in, it often does so at the cost of what remaining local business exists. Because discount chains operate at a much larger scale than local businesses, that means not only can they sell things at far lower rates but they can also do things that would destroy a local business. The example brought up in the article is that having people steal your goods and money is baked into your losses. They can operate with little security or care about the store itself, increasing revenue and further pushing out local businesses.

When cities suffer from industrialization and suburban flight, discount chains swoop in like economic vampires, draining and destroying what's left until there's either nothing left or they're the sole business in town.

This isn't an easy problem to solve because both of the answers to it would require doing something that Americans seem to generally hate. The first would be subsidizing smaller businesses so that they can compete with larger ones or opening local government-owned store [2] but that tends to invoke cries of socialism or complaints about taxes. The second option is to admit that these cities are dying and encourage people to instead move to economic centers, but people are stubborn and there's growing resentment towards larger cities.

So what's left is the problem illustrated in the parent article.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/09/what-happene...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/11/22/baldwin-flo...