Aye, I lived in Ithaca, NY for a while, and they had a local law that the only businesses within the town center could not be franchise stores, and had to be independently owned. Chain stores could open, but had to do so down the highway about ~2 miles away.

It is _incredible_ the difference it makes on town culture, and _how much better it was_

Downtown Ithaca most likely would have been just as vibrant without that law. It's a town with a higher median household income than the US as a whole, plus two colleges, both of which cost >$50k a year to attend. The students, especially of Cornell, are a great and continuing source of relatively price-insensitive consumers.

Chapel Hill, NC has a Target smack dab in the middle of downtown, and everyone would agree that it's an idyllic college town with a wonderful culture.

i respectfully disagree. the "wonderful culture" chapel hill is known for is a memory from the 80s and 90s. the target store that opened on franklin street is maybe the most blatant sign of the shitty generic direction the town has been going in. it's a nice memory though. here's to the squirrel nut zippers.

Ithaca is a special case as it's essentially the main town outside of Cornell University.

Not all small towns have a major research university or other dependable benefactor around - most of the small town representatives can easily be bought/bribed by a major chain.

Ithaca being a college town definitely brings more money into the town. That definitely adds to the vibrancy. But I think my statement still stands independent of that fact :)

Most town centers did not have chains open in them, but the stores in them still died because people preferred shopping at big box stores 2 miles away.

A small college town with a reputation of rich kids going to it is probably going to have an outlier amount of single people with extra money to throw around little shops. If they have families and start budgeting, they will be off to Costco and Walmart and Target to save money like the bulk of the US.

This is an understandable sentiment, but I do not think it applies in this case. In the case of Ithaca, most single young people live closer to the colleges, and drive or bus to the chain stores.

The actual town, I think, survives on the individual shop mentality because the physical layout of the town. The Ithaca town square is physically designed to be the physcial, social and cultural center of the town, which allows the shops there an advantage of being a center of the community, completely surrounded on all sides by walkable residential living. This gives them a competitive advantage, that lets them compete with the bigger box stores which require taking a bus or car a few minutes downtown to arrive at.

people often give this "just so" explanation, but it doesn't quite add up to me. if it's really so inconvenient to go to the consolidated Walmart location a few towns over, why don't you see shops start to reopen on main street? I suspect the root cause has more to do with cars than a particular megastore.

The needed capital to re-start. They have lost the critical mass. For many small towns, these stores were started many decades ago.

I guess technically, if a store can't be re-started today is kind of like also saying, if the small town can't re-start itself, then that points to question, why would a small town need to exist at all today.

Think the end of this line of reasoning is that small towns have no reason to exist, so let them go?

> Think the end of this line of reasoning is that small towns have no reason to exist, so let them go?

Correct.

Banking and financing is a big part of it too. Good luck getting Chase to give you a loan to start Monky General. I believe that’s a big part of why you see so many franchise chains. The loan officer for an out of town bank can probably find a hundred similar Subways or whatever and have a good idea of what the financials will look like. On the other hand he has no clue how well or poorly a locally owned business will do so he wants no part of it.

There's nothing great about small towns. All of this is waxing of people who don't live in small towns that think it is oh so nice to be able to go to a cute little store on vacation at 11:30am to get a muffin on Saturday. Never mind that the store itself is closed Monday to Friday.

Grew up in a small town, couldn’t disagree more. But what you’re describing is a vacation town, many small towns have become one because of the proliferation of second homes: there aren’t enough people around in the week for stores to justify staying open.

But not all towns are like that.

I live in a small town. It's great! There's a Walmart in the next town over.

The DMV experience in a small town versus a big city is night and day in the small town’s favor. That’s true for pretty much all government services from the Post Office down to the County office.

The main benefit of small towns is that social capital matters and reputation matters. Of course those are disadvantages to misbehavers.

> social capital matters and reputation matters. Of course those are disadvantages to misbehavers.

This is something that many young adults have forgotten, because it's increasingly more trendy to move around a lot in your 20s while developing your career. Nobody cares in a big city if you're an asshole, because there's a million other people to associate with and most likely the asshole and everyone around them aren't going to still be there in five years.

The downside of the small town social setting is that it can be cliquey.

What?! This runs completely counter to my experience living in a small town. A town small enough that the post office doesn’t do to door delivery, you’ve got to go pick it up and the closest DMV is an hour away in the city. Small towns don’t generally have services like that at all.

Of course, everyone's definition of a small town, and the kinds of small towns that they've experienced, are going to differ. I'm not too far (just a county over) from a quaint little town with under a thousand people; the post office there delivers to homes, and the nearest DMV is a 15-minute drive away, in a "city" of almost 15k.

Come to think of it, in my own county, which is not highly urban by any stretch of the imagination, you'd be maximum a half-hour drive away from the nearest DMV starting from any main road. Obviously, that doesn't hold if it takes you 15 minutes to get down your own driveway ;-)

I could easily see some of the much more remote Western small towns being further away from anything.

Right but the issue is that people want to go there, if nobody went there it would not be a problem. There is th emoney aspect of course, but supermarket (of any type really) is convenience vs having to go to a bunch of smaller stores.